Explore "The Penrose Mystery" by R. Austin Freeman on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I HAVE REFERRED MORE THAN once to Thorndyke's habitual unwillingness to discuss uncompleted cases, excepting in relation to questions of fact, or to disclose any opinions or theories that he had built on the facts which were known to us both. I had come to accept this reticence as a condition of our friendship and usually refrained from any attempts to discover what lines his thoughts were pursuing or what inferences he had drawn. But when we met at our chambers in the evening after our visit to Queen Square, I found him in a mood of unwonted expansiveness, apparently ready to discuss our present case without any reservations.
The discussion opened with a question that I put tentatively, half expecting the usual invitation to exercise my own admirable faculty of deduction.