"Yet you do believe in it?"

"I've a grotesque belief in it, yes."

"Are you sure your reason for calling this idea 'grotesque' isn't
merely that you dislike it?"

"Well," I said, with the thrilling hope that he was a companion in
absurdity, "doesn't it seem grotesque to you?"

"It seems strange."

"You believe in it?"

"Oh, absolutely."

"Hurrah!"

He smiled at my pleasure, and I, at the risk of reentanglement
in metaphysics, claimed him as standing shoulder to shoulder with me
against "A Melbourne Man." This claim he gently disputed.

"You may think me very prosaic," he said, "but I can't believe
without evidence."

"Well, I'm equally prosaic and equally at a disadvantage: I can't take
my own belief as evidence, and I've no other evidence to go on."

He asked me if I had ever made a study of palmistry. I said I had