“I’m very sorry,” I said; “but really it was impossible to bring them with me.” Here I most certainly meant to conclude the sentence: and it was with a feeling of utter amazement, which I cannot adequately describe, that I heard myself going on speaking. “—but they are to join me here in the course of the evening” were the words, uttered in my voice, and seeming to come from my lips.
“I’m so glad!” Lady Muriel joyfully replied. “I shall enjoy introducing them to some of my friends here! When do you expect them?”
I took refuge in silence. The only honest reply would have been “That was not my remark. I didn’t say it, and it isn’t true!” But I had not the moral courage to make such a confession. The character of a ‘lunatic’ is not, I believe, very difficult to acquire: but it is amazingly difficult to get rid of: and it seemed quite certain that any such speech as that would quite justify the issue of a writ ‘de lunatico inquirendo.’
Lady Muriel evidently thought I had failed to hear her question, and turned to Arthur with a remark on some other subject; and I had time to recover from my shock of surprise—or to awake out of my momentary ‘eerie’ condition, whichever it was.
When things around me seemed once more to be real, Arthur was saying “I’m afraid there’s no help for it: they must be finite in number.”
“I should be sorry to have to believe it,” said Lady Muriel. “Yet, when one comes to think of it, there are no new melodies, now-a-days. What people talk of as ‘the last new song’ always recalls to me some tune I’ve known as a child!”
“The day must come—if the world lasts long enough——” said Arthur, “when every possible tune will have been composed—every possible pun perpetrated——” (Lady Muriel wrung her hands, like a tragedy-queen) “and, worse than that, every possible book written! For the number of words is finite.”
“It’ll make very little difference to the authors,” I suggested. “Instead of saying ‘what book shall I write?’ an author will ask himself ‘which book shall I write?’ A mere verbal distinction!”
Lady Muriel gave me an approving smile. “But lunatics would always write new books, surely?” she went on. “They couldn’t write the sane books over again!”
“True,” said Arthur. “But their books would come to an end, also. The number of lunatic books is as finite as the number of lunatics.”