"What is the instance you've got up your sleeve?" He smoked with great
energy, and cast his eyes alertly about as if to make sure that there was
no chance of Wanhope's physically escaping him, from the corner of the
divan, where he sat pretty well hemmed in by the rest of us, spreading in
an irregular circle before him.

"You unscientific people are always wanting an instance, as if an
instance were convincing. An instance is only suggestive; a thousand
instances, if you please, are convincing," said the psychologist. "But I
don't know that I wish to be convincing. I would rather be enquiring.
That is much more interesting, and, perhaps, profitable."

"All the same," Minver persisted, apparently in behalf of Rulledge, but
with an after-grudge of his own, "you'll allow that you were thinking of
something in particular when you began with that generalization about the
lost art of personifying?"

"Oh, that is very curious," said the psychologist. "We talk of
generalizing, but is there any such thing? Aren't we always striving from
one concrete to another, and isn't what we call generalizing merely a
process of finding our way?"

"I see what you mean," said the artist, expressing in that familiar
formula the state of the man who hopes to know what the other man means.

"That's what I say," Rulledge put in. "You've got something up your
sleeve. What is it?"

Wanhope struck the little bell on the table before him, but, without
waiting for a response, he intercepted a waiter who was passing with a