Tales of Men and Ghosts

“WHAT’S become of the Daunt Diana?  You mean to say you never heard the sequel?”

Ringham Finney threw himself back into his chair with the smile of the collector who has a good thing to show.  He knew he had a good listener, at any rate.  I don’t think much of Ringham’s snuff-boxes, but his anecdotes are usually worth while.  He’s a psychologist astray among bibelots, and the best bits he brings back from his raids on Christie’s and the Hotel Drouot are the fragments of human nature he picks up on those historic battle-fields.  If his flair in enamel had been half as good we should have heard of the Finney collection by this time.

He really has—­queer fatuous investigator!—­an unusually sensitive touch for the human texture, and the specimens he gathers into his museum of heterogeneous memories have almost always some mark of the rare and chosen.  I felt, therefore, that I was really to be congratulated on the fact that I didn’t know what had become of the Daunt Diana, and on having before me a long evening in which to learn.  I had just led my friend back, after an excellent dinner at Foyot’s, to the shabby pleasant sitting-room of my rive-gauche hotel; and I knew that, once I had settled him in a good arm-chair, and put a box of cigars at his elbow, I could trust him not to budge till I had the story.