"Then do you think you could give him a little message, word for word as
I give it to you?"

"Senile decay," I admitted, "may have paralyzed most of my faculties,
but as a repeater of messages verbatim, I am faithful as a phonograph."

"Tell him this, then." She ticked the message off on her fingers. "A
half is not exactly the same as a whole. Don't forget the 'exactly.'"

"Is this an occasion for mathematical axioms?" I demanded. But she had
already gone, with a parting injunction to be precise.

When, three days thereafter, I retailed that banality to young Mr. Dyke,
it produced a startling though not instantaneous effect.

"I've got it!" he shouted.

"Don't scare me off my bench! What is it you've got?"

"The answer. She said he was not exactly her brother."

"Who?"

"That bully-looking big chap in the roadster who took her away." He
delivered this shameless reversal of a passionately asserted opinion
without a quiver. "Now she says a half isn't exactly the same as a
whole. He wasn't exactly her brother, she said; he's her half brother.
'Toora-loora-loo,' as we say in Patagonia."