‘I am the last person in the world to hear news,’ observed Mrs Merdle, carelessly arranging her stronghold. ‘Who is it?’
‘What an admirable witness you would make!’ said Bar. ‘No jury (unless we could empanel one of blind men) could resist you, if you were ever so bad a one; but you would be such a good one!’
‘Why, you ridiculous man?’ asked Mrs Merdle, laughing.
Bar waved his double eye-glass three or four times between himself and the Bosom, as a rallying answer, and inquired in his most insinuating accents:
‘What am I to call the most elegant, accomplished and charming of women, a few weeks, or it may be a few days, hence?’
‘Didn’t your bird tell you what to call her?’ answered Mrs Merdle. ‘Do ask it to-morrow, and tell me the next time you see me what it says.’
This led to further passages of similar pleasantry between the two; but Bar, with all his sharpness, got nothing out of them. Physician, on the other hand, taking Mrs Merdle down to her carriage and attending on her as she put on her cloak, inquired into the symptoms with his usual calm directness.
‘May I ask,’ he said, ‘is this true about Merdle?’
‘My dear doctor,’ she returned, ‘you ask me the very question that I was half disposed to ask you.’
‘To ask me! Why me?’