“You look very demure,” said Mandrake. “What are you plotting?”

“Plotting! That’s the word! My dear, I am up to my ears in conspiracy!” He leant forward and tapped Mandrake on the knee. “Come now,” said Jonathan, ”tell me this. What do you think are my interests?”

Mandrake looked fixedly at him. “Your interests?” he repeated.

“Yes. What sort of fellow do you think I am? It is not only women, you know, who are interested in the impressions they make on their friends. Or is there something unexpectedly feminine in my curiosity? Never mind. Indulge me so far. Come, now.”

“You skip from one query to another. Your interests, I should hazard, lie between your books, your estate, and — well — I imagine you are interested in what journalists are pleased to call human contacts.”

“Good,” said Jonathan. “Excellent. Human contacts. Go on.”

“As for the sort of fellow you may be,” Mandrake continued, “upon my word, I don’t know. From my point of view a very pleasant fellow. You understand things, the things that seem to me to be important. You have never asked me, for instance, why I don’t write about real people. I regard that avoidance as conclusive.”

“Would you say, now, that I had a sense of the dramatic?”

“What is the dramatic? Is it merely a sense of theatre, or is it an appreciation of aesthetic climax in the extroverted sense?”

“I don’t know what that means,” said Jonathan impatiently. “And I’m dashed if I think you do.”

“Words,” said Mandrake. “Words, words, words.” But he looked rather put out.

“Well, damn it, it doesn’t matter two ha’p’th of pins. I maintain that I have a sense of drama in the ordinary unclassy sense. My sense of drama, whether you like it or not, attracts me to your own work. I don’t say I understand it, but for me it’s got something. It jerks me out of my ordinary reactions to ordinary theatrical experiences. So I like it.”