.

My efforts had invested them with a sort of amusing profundity.
But when Fyne and I got back into the room, then in the searching, domestic, glare of the lamp, inimical to the play of fancy, I saw these two stripped of every vesture it had amused me to put on them for fun.
Queer enough they were.

Is there a human being that isn't that--more or less secretly?
But whatever their secret, it was manifest to me that it was neither subtle nor profound.

They were a good, stupid, earnest couple and very much bothered.

They were that--with the usual unshaded crudity of average people.