Wolfe was going on. "I didn't have a client this morning, or even an hour ago, but now I have. Mr. Rowcliff's ferocious spasms, countenanced by you gentlemen, have made the challenge ineluctable. When Mr. Goodwin said that I was not concerned in this matter and that he was acting solely in his own personal interest, he was telling the truth. As you may know, he is not indifferent to those attributes of young women that constitute the chief reliance of our race in our gallant struggle against the menace of the insects. He is especially vulnerable to young women who possess not only those more obvious charms but also have a knack of stimulating his love of chivalry and adventure and his preoccupation with the picturesque and the passionate. Priscilla Eads was such a woman. She spent some time with Mr. Goodwin yesterday; he locked her in a bedroom of my house. Within three hours of her eviction by him at my behest, she was brutally murdered. I will not say that the effect on him amounted to derangement, but it was considerable. He bounded out of my house like a man obsessed, after telling me that he was going single-handed after a murderer, and after arming himself. It was pathetic, but it was also humane, romantic, and thoroughly admirable, and your callous and churlish treatment of him leaves me with no alternative. I am at his service. He is my client."
Rowcliff's voice blurted incredulously, "You mean, Archie Goodwin is your client?"
The dry cutting voice of Bowen, the DA, put in, "All that rigmarole was leading up to that?"

"What would you think of me," Wolfe asked him, "if, solely on information furnished by you here and now, I accepted this case and started to work on it?"
"What would I think? That's what I want!" "Surely not," Wolfe objected.
"Surely you would be employing a jackass."