“‘Bleak House’?” you say.
“No!” he snaps; “‘Dombey and Son.’ One day, when Charles Dickens was at work on ‘Dombey and Son,’ he was approached by his biographer, John—er—er—”
“Forster?”
“No; it wasn’t his biographer, either; it was Edmund Yates.”
You now take a gleeful pleasure in seeing how hopelessly you can make him tangle himself up by the refusal of your help, but he doesn’t care. He’ll tell it in his own words, though the heavens fall and though he starts a hundred stories.
“Charles Dickens had a very loud way of—er—er—”
“Dressing?”
“No, no! He had a loud way of talking, and he and Edmund—er—er—”
“Yates?”