Hot from several
affronts, which were equally galling, whether ignorant or intended, he
could conceive of nothing more sweet than to take the fellow down.
"I shouldn't wonder," said he, "if Mr. Davenport had more particular
reasons to remember that play."
Davenport looked up from his plate, but merely with slight surprise, not
with disapproval. Bagley himself stared hard at Larcher, then glanced at
Davenport, and finally blurted out a laugh, and said:
"So Dav has been giving you his fairy tale? I thought he'd dropped it as
a played-out chestnut. God knows how the delusion ever started in his
head. That's a question for the psychologists--or the doctors, maybe. But
he used to imagine--I give him credit for really imagining it--he used to
imagine he had written that play. I s'pose that's what he's been telling
you. But I thought he'd got over the hallucination; or got tired telling
about it, anyhow."
But, in the circumstances, no nice consideration of probabilities was
necessary to make Larcher the warm partisan of Davenport. He answered,
with as fine a derision as he could summon:
"Any unbiased judge, with you two gentlemen before him, if he had to
decide which had written that play, wouldn't take long to agree with Mr.
Davenport's hallucination, as you call it."
Mr. Bagley gazed at Larcher for a few moments in silence, as if not
knowing exactly what to make of him, or what manner to use toward him. He
seemed at last to decide against a wrathful attitude, and replied:
"I suppose you're a very unbiased judge, and a very superior person all
round.
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