Jimmie he asked the same help. He himself, for two days and nights, now and then seeing Uncle George and Slant-Face, trailed Peter Loveman from office to courts and back again—and particularly about the restaurants and theaters and after-theater theaters, which comprised Loveman’s especial habitat.

But not again did Clifford see Loveman with Mary Regan. The second night, however, he did see Loveman with young Morton, and with the two a middle-aged man with a masterful face. Morton’s father, Clifford guessed.

And yet, though he saw nothing, all his senses assured him with growing insistence that great forces were at their hidden work—those subtle, complex forces that operate indirectly, patiently, with infinite cunning, behind the alluring and often innocent visage of brilliant Big Pleasure. And also he had a growing sense that this was not primarily a detective’s puzzle; but primarily a matter of the eternal human mystery of how human beings react, and[25] how they may be artfully stimulated. He felt himself just a human being in the midst of a human problem whose outlines he could not yet discern.

[25]

On the third day of failure it came to Clifford that there was a chance—a bare chance—that Loveman had no design involving Mary Regan, and he decided to go openly to him. At Loveman’s lavish downtown offices he was told Loveman had telephoned he would not appear that morning. Twenty minutes later Clifford, after having sent in his card by the Japanese butler-valet, was in Loveman’s study. The room, the studio of an apartment designed for an artist, was furnished with a disordered luxury and culture which Clifford knew to be a genuine characteristic of the strange little notable on whom he waited. Here were rows and rows of first editions; old Dutch etchings, among them several original Rembrandts; a helter-skelter gallery of autographed photographs of favorite actresses. For a score of years, as Clifford knew, Loveman had not missed an important first night.

Whatever might be the outcome of this interview, Clifford knew that sometime, somehow, between him and Loveman there would be a conflict of wits. So he looked swiftly and curiously around the room, for concerning this room there were current many fables. This study, and not the downtown office, was said to be Loveman’s real workshop. Here were created those astute plans, in which the influence of Loveman was never traceable, that brought to his[26] downtown office those big-fee’d domestic cases, to be fought brilliantly and sensationally in the 

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