It was not true to say of Mr. Eames that he lived on Nepenthe because he was wanted by the London police for something that happened in Richmond Park, that his real name was not Eames at all but Daniels—­the notorious Hodgson Daniels, you know, who was mixed up in the Lotus Club scandal, that he was the local representative of an international gang of white-slave traffickers who had affiliated offices in every part of the world, that he was not a man at all but an old boarding-house keeper who had very good reasons for assuming the male disguise, that he was a morphinomaniac, a disfrocked Baptist minister, a pawnbroker out of work, a fire-worshipper, a Transylvanian, a bank clerk who had had a fall, a decayed jockey who disgraced himself at a subsequent period in connection with some East-End mission for reforming the boys of Bermondsey and then, after pawning his mother’s jewelry, writing anonymous threatening letters to society ladies about their husbands and vice-versa, trying to blackmail three Cabinet Ministers and tricking poor servant-girls out of their hard-earned wages by the sale of sham Bibles, was luckily run to earth in Piccadilly Circus, after an exciting chase, with a forty-pound salmon under his arm which he had been seen to lift from the window of a Bond Street fishmonger.

All these things, and a good many more, had been said.  Eames knew it. 
Kind friends had seen to that.

To contrive such stories was a certain lady’s method of asserting her personality on the island.  She seldom went into society owing to some physical defect in her structure; she could only sit at home, like Penelope, weaving these and other bright tapestries—­odds and ends of servants’ gossip, patched together by the virulent industry of her own disordered imagination.  It consoled Mr. Eames slightly to reflect that he was not the only resident singled out for such aspersions; that the more harmless a man’s life, the more fearsome the legends.  He suffered, none the less.  This was why he seldom entered the premises of the Alpha and Omega Club where, quite apart from his objection to Parker’s poison and the loose and rowdy talk of the place, he was liable to encounter the lady’s stepbrother.  Of course he knew perfectly well what he ought to have done.  He ought to have imitated the example of other people who behaved like scoundrels and openly gloried in it.  That was the only way to be even with her; it took the wind out of her sails.  Keith often put the matter into a nutshell: 

“The practical advantages of doing something outrageous must be clear to you.  It is the only way of stopping her mouth, unless you like to have her poisoned, which might be rather expensive even down here, though you may be sure I would do my best to smooth things over with Malipizzo.  But I am afraid you don’t realize the advantages of ruffianism as a mode of art, and a mode of life.  Only think:  a thousand wrongs to every right!  What an opening