You gave too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.

There is nothing so dangerous for anyone who has something to hide as conversation!... A human being, Hastings, cannot resist theopportunity to reveal himself and express his personality which conversation gives him. Every time he will give himself away.

Is there ever any particular spot where one can put one's finger and say, "It all began that day, at such a time and such a place, with such an incident?

Downstairs in the lounge, by the third pillar from the left, there sits an old lady with a sweet, placid, spinsterish face and a mind that has plumbed the depths of human iniquity and taken it all as in the day's work....where crime is concerned, she's the goods.

I'm not often bored,' I assured her. "Life's not long enough for that.

Very unfortunately, she had no husband. She had never had a husband, and therefore did not kill a husband.

The point is that one's got an instinct to live. One doesn't live because one's reason assents to living. People who, as we say, 'would be better dead' don't want to die! People who apparently have everything to live for just let themselves fade out of life because they haven't got the energy to fight.