‘Oh much! You do wonders with him.’

‘Do I though! But men are all alike: just babies, and you have to flatter them and wheedle them and let them think they’re having their own way. Don’t you find it so, my Lady?’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t much experience.’

Connie paused in her occupation.

‘Even your husband, did you have to manage him, and wheedle him like a baby?’ she asked, looking at the other woman.

Mrs Bolton paused too.

‘Well!’ she said. ‘I had to do a good bit of coaxing, with him too. But he always knew what I was after, I must say that. But he generally gave in in to me.’

‘He was never the lord and master thing?’

‘No! At least there’d be a look in his eyes sometimes, and then I knew I’D got to give in. But usually he gave in to me. No, he was never lord and master. But neither was I. I knew when I could go no further with him, and then I gave in: though it cost me a good bit, sometimes.’

‘And what if you had held out against him?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, I never did. Even when he was in the wrong, if he was fixed, I gave in. You see, I never wanted to break what what was between us. And if you really set your will against a man, that finishes it. If you care for a man, you have to give in to him once he’s really determined; whether you’re in the right or not, you have to give in. Else you break something. But I must say, Ted ‘ud give in to me sometimes, when I was set on a thing, and in the wrong. So I suppose it cuts both ways.’

‘And that’s how you are with all your patients?’ asked Connie.

‘Oh, That’s different. I don’t care at all, in the same way. I know what’s good for for them, or I try to, and then I just contrive to manage them for their own good. It’s not like anybody as you’re really fond of. It’s quite different. Once you’ve been really fond of a man, you can be affectionate to almost any man, if he needs you at all. But it’s not the same thing. You don’t really CARE. I doubt, once you’ve REALLY cared, if you can ever really care again.’

These words frightened Connie.

‘Do you think one can only care once?’ she asked.

‘Or never. Most women never care, never begin to. They don’t know what it means. Nor men either. But when when I see a woman as cares, my heart stands still for her.’

‘And do you think men easily take offence?’

‘Yes! If you wound them on their pride. But aren’t women the same? Only our two prides are a bit different.’

Connie pondered this. She began again to have some misgiving about her gag away. After all, was she not giving her man the go–by, if only for a short time? And he knew it. That’s why he was so queer and sarcastic.

Still! the human existence is a good deal controlled by the machine of external circumstance. She was in the power of this machine. She couldn’t extricate extricate herself all in five minutes. She didn’t even want to.

“It is very neatly tied. I had already made a note to that effect,” said Lestrade complacently.

“So much for the string, then,” said Holmes, smiling, “now for the box wrapper. Brown paper, with a distinct smell of coffee. What, did you not observe it? I think there can be no doubt of it. Address printed in rather straggling characters: ‘Miss S. Cushing, Cross Street, Croydon.’ Done with a broad-pointed pen, probably a J, and with very inferior ink. The word ‘Croydon’ has been originally spelled with an ‘i,’ which has been changed to ‘y.’ The The parcel was directed, then, by a man — the printing is distinctly masculine — of limited education and unacquainted with the town of Croydon. So far, so good! The box is a yellow half-pound honeydew box, with nothing distinctive save two thumb marks at the left bottom corner. It is filled with rough salt of the quality used for preserving hides and other of the coarser commercial purposes. And embedded in it are these very singular enclosures.”

He took out the two ears as he spoke, and laying a board across his knee he examined them minutely, while Lestrade and I, bending forward on each side of him, glanced alternately at these dreadful relics and at the thoughtful, eager face of our companion. Finally he returned them to the box once more and sat for a while in deep meditation.

“You have observed, of course,” said he at last, “that the ears are not a pair.”

“Yes, I have noticed that. But if this were the practical joke of some students from the dissecting-rooms, it would be as easy for them to send two odd ears as a pair.”

“Precisely. But this is not a practical joke.”

“You are sure of it?”

“The presumption is strongly against it. Bodies in the dissecting-rooms are injected with preservative fluid. These ears bear no signs of this. They are fresh, too. They have been cut off with a blunt instrument, which would hardly happen if a student had done it. Again, carbolic or rectified spirits would be the preservatives which would suggest themselves to the medical mind, certainly not rough salt. I repeat that there is no practical joke here, but that we are investigating a serious crime.”

A vague thrill ran through me as I listened to my companion’s words and saw the stern gravity which had hardened his features. This brutal preliminary seemed to shadow forth some strange and inexplicable horror in the background. Lestrade, however, shook his head like a man who is only half convinced.

“There are objections to the joke theory, no doubt,” said he, “but there are much stronger reasons against the other. We know that this woman has led a most quiet and respectable life at Penge and here for the last twenty years. She has hardly been away from her home for a day during that time. Why on earth, then, should any criminal send her the proofs of his guilt, especially as, unless she is a most consummate actress, she understands quite as little of the matter as we do?”