About this story
You are Dyson, a London idler with unfinished manuscripts and a taste for the marvelous, until Charles Phillipps turns years of friendly argument into evidence: a worn gold coin found on the pavement, and a spectacled young man in the fog begging you not to let three strangers see it. The trio who catch you up, smiling Davies, twitching Richmond, a woman called Helen claiming him as her brother, tell too neat a story. Then a cry rises from an alley, and a cab opens on a leaking parcel.
How it opens
London provided you with endless material and very little finished work.
TobacconistMr Dyson, that tobacco mixture may discourage every customer but you.
You defended the experiment from your customary seat on an empty cask.
A man should test any invention that survives its inventor's face.
Choose
I invent wonders; finishing them is clerical labor.
The marvelous is London's only honest subject.
Share a pipe, and we can quarrel properly.