Dennis seemed less charmed at the prospect.
“It’s all very well for you,” he grumbled. “You can talk all this highbrow stuff about art and books. I always feel a perfect fool sitting and listening to you.”
“That’s good for you,” said Griselda serenely. “It puts you in your place. Anyway, I don’t think Mr. Raymond West is so frightfully clever as he pretends to be.”
“Very few of us are,” I said.
I wondered very much what exactly it was that Miss Marple wished to talk over. Of all the ladies in my congregation, I consider her by far the shrewdest. Not only does she see and hear practically everything that goes on, but she draws amazingly neat and apposite deductions from the facts that come under her notice.
If I were at any time to set out on a career of deceit, it would be of Miss Marple that I should be afraid.
What Griselda called the Nephew Amusing Party started off at a little after nine, and whilst I was waiting for Miss Marple to arrive I amused myself by drawing up a kind of schedule of the facts connected with the crime. I arranged them so far as possible in chronological order. I am not a punctual person, but I am a neat one, and I like things jotted down in a methodical fashion.
At half-past nine punctually, there was a little tap on the window, and I rose and admitted Miss Marple.
She had a very fine Shetland shawl thrown over her head and shoulders and was looking rather old and frail. She came in full of little fluttering remarks.
“So good of you to let me come – and so good of dear Griselda – Raymond admires her so much – the perfect Greuze he always calls her… Shall I sit here? I am not taking your chair? Oh! thank you…. No, I won’t have a footstool.”
I deposited the Shetland shawl on a chair and returned to take a chair facing my guest. We looked at each other, and a little deprecating smile broke out on her face.
“I feel that you must be wondering why – why I am so interested in all this. You may possibly think it’s very unwomanly. No – please – I should like to explain if I may.”
She paused a moment, a pink colour suffusing her cheeks.
“You see,” she began at last, “living alone, as I do, in a rather out-of-the-way part of the world one has to have a hobby. There is, of course, woolwork, and Guides, and Welfare, and sketching, but my hobby is – and always has been – Human Nature. So varied – and so very fascinating. And, of course, in a small village, with nothing to distract one, one has such ample opportunity for becoming what I might call proficient in one’s study. One begins to class people, quite definitely, just as though they were birds or flowers, group so-and-so, genus this, species that. Sometimes, of course, one makes mistakes, but less and less as time goes on. And then, too, one tests on oneself. One takes a little problem – for instance, the gill of picked shrimps that amused dear Griselda so much – a quite unimportant mystery but absolutely incomprehensible unless one solves it right. And then there was that matter of the changed cough drops, and the butcher’s wife’s umbrella – the last absolutely meaningless unless on the assumption that the greengrocer was not behaving at all nicely with the chemist’s wife – which, of course, turned out to be the case. It is so fascinating, you know, to apply one’s judgment and find that one is right.”
“You usually are, I believe,” I said, smiling.
“That, I am afraid, is what has made me a little conceited,” confessed Miss Marple. “But I have always wondered whether, if some day a really big mystery came along, I should be able to do the same thing. I mean – just solve it correctly. Logically, it ought to be exactly the same thing. After all, a tiny working model of a torpedo is just the same as a real torpedo.”