"Your commonplace book? I presume. Was it something I said? My friends do put down bits of my conversation ready for copy."
She smoothed out her velvet gown with a plump, white hand.
"Copy books?" I murmured.
"Certainly not," she retorted snappily. "Copy means matter for books—anything interesting or amusing, that you hear and see. Have you not met any literary people?"
"No," I returned humbly. "But Amelia—Amelia is my maid—knew a poet in her last place; he visited the Tompkinses."
"How interesting! I wonder if she remembers his name, and what he was like."
"I know what he was like," I said, delighted to have interested her. "Amelia described him to me. He was like a garden leek that had been boiled without soda—yellowish looking I suppose she meant. And a great friend of mine once knew an authoress—a fifth edition, Marie Corelli sort of writer—whose head was like a mangel-wurzel."
I began to feel more on an equality with Mrs. Winderby. Nanty's and Amelia's reflected glory was raising my spirits.
"I am afraid I don't understand you," my visitor said.
"Oh, because it was so——" I stopped abruptly.