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"Tell me, please," he asked suddenly, looking almost insolently

at him and taking a kind of pleasure in his own insolence. "I

believe it's a sort of legal rule, a sort of legal tradition--for

all investigating lawyers--to begin their attack from afar, with

a trivial, or at least an irrelevant subject, so as to encourage,

or rather, to divert the man they are cross-examining, to disarm

his caution and then all at once to give him an unexpected

knock-down blow with some fatal question. Isn't that so? It's a

sacred tradition, mentioned, I fancy, in all the manuals of the

art?"

"Yes, yes.... Why, do you imagine that was why I spoke about

government quarters... eh?"