Sir Charles however was far from delighted. From the red swelling of the veins on his forehead it was obvious that something was going to burst out of him in a very few seconds. Mrs. Fielder-Flemming leapt, like an agitated but determined hen, for the gap.
“We have agreed to waive the law of slander here,” she almost squawked. “Personalities don’t exist for us. If the name crops up of anyone personally known to us, we utter it as unflinchingly, in whatever connection, as if it were a complete stranger’s. That is the definite arrangement we came to last night, Mr. President, isn’t it? We are to do what we conceive to be our duty to society quite irrespective of any personal considerations?”
For a moment Roger indulged his tremors. He did not want his beautiful Circle to explode in a cloud of dust, never again to be reunited. And though he could not but admire the flurried but undaunted courage of Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, he had to be content to envy it so far as Sir Charles was concerned, for he certainly did not possess anything like it himself. On the other hand there was no doubt that the lady had right on her side, and what can any President do but administer justice?
“Perfectly correct, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming,” he had to admit, hoping his voice sounded as firm as he would have wished.
For a moment a blue glare, emanating from Sir Charles, enveloped him luridly. Then, as Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, evidently heartened by this official support, took up her bomb again, the rays of the glare were switched again on to her. Roger, nervously watching the two of them, could not help reflecting that blue rays are things which should never be directed on to bombs.
Mrs. Fielder-Flemming juggled featly with her bomb. Often though it seemed about to slip through her fingers, it never quite reached the ground or detonated. “Very well, then. I will go on. My triangle now had the second of its members. On the analogy of the Barnet murder, where was the third to be found? Obviously, with Molineux as the prototype, in some person who was anxious to prevent the first member from marrying the second.
“So far, you will see, I am not out of harmony with the conclusions Sir Charles gave us last night, though my method of arriving at them was perhaps somewhat different. He gave us a triangle also, without expressly defining it as such (perhaps even without recognising it as such). And the first two members of his triangle are precisely the same as the first two of mine.”
Here Mrs. Fielder-Flemming made a notable effort to return something of Sir Charles’s glare, in defiant challenge to contradiction. As she had simply stated a plain fact however, which Sir Charles was quite unable to refute without explaining that he had not meant what he had meant the evening before, the challenge passed unanswered. Also the glare visibly diminished. But for all that (patently remarked Sir Charles’s expression) a triangle by any other name does not smell so unsavoury.
“It is when we come to the third member,” pursued Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, with renewed poise, “that we are at variance. Sir Charles suggested to us Lady Pennefather. I have not the pleasure of Lady Pennefather’s acquaintance, but Miss Dammers who knows her well, tells me that in almost every particular the estimate given us by Sir Charles of her character was wrong. She is neither mean, grasping, greedy, nor in any imaginable way capable of the awful deed with which Sir Charles, perhaps a little rashly, was ready to credit her. Lady Pennefather, I understand, is a particularly sweet and kindly woman; somewhat broad-minded no doubt, but none the worse for that; indeed as some of us would think, a good deal the better.”
Mrs. Fielder-Flemming encouraged the belief that she was not merely tolerant of a little harmless immorality, but actually ready to act as godmother to any particular instance of it. Indeed she went sometimes quite a long détour out of her way in order to propagate this belief among her friends. But unfortunately her friends would persist in remembering that she had refused to have anything more to do with one of her own nieces since the latter, on learning that her middle-aged husband kept, for purposes of convenience, a different mistress in each of the four quarters of England, and just to be on the safe side one in Scotland too, had run away with a young man of her own with whom she happened to be very devotedly in love.
“Just as I differ from Sir Charles over the identity of the third person in the triangle,” went on Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, happily ignorant of her friends’ memories, “so I differ from him in the means by which that identity is to be established. We are at complete variance in our ideas regarding the very heart of the problem, the motive. Sir Charles would have us think that this was a murder committed (or attempted, rather) for gain; I am convinced that the incentive was, at any rate, a less ignoble one than that. Murder, we are taught, can never be really justifiable; but there are occasions when it comes dangerously near it. This, in my opinion, was one of them.
“It is in the character of Sir Eustace himself that I see the clue to the identity of the third person. Let us consider it for a moment. We are not restricted by any considerations of slander, and we can say at once that, from certain points of view, Sir Eustace is a quite undesirable member of the community. From the point of view of a young man, for the sake of
