I put my cup down and said, “No argument.” Actually there could have been one. There had been plenty of nothingness in results, but not in efforts. Somewhere in the nine notebooks here on my table ' I write these reports on my own machine up in my room, not in the office ' are the names of four males and six females, supplied by Jaquette-Jackson when she came to look at the orchids Wednesday afternoon, who had been seen by Saul and Fred. For something to bite on, hopeless. Of course anything is possible. It was possible that one of the women had thought that Isabel had pinched her lipstick and had gone to get it and got mad and bopped her, or that one of the men hated Rudyard Kipling and couldn’t stand a woman who had him bound in leather, but you need something better than ten billion possibles to get your teeth into. Any little piece of straw will do, but you have to have something. For instance, statistics. There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.
