Jevons didn't answer her. He simply looked at her and blinked. Then he looked away again.
"Come," I said, "you might finish what you were going to say."
"I don't know," he muttered, "that I was going to say anything—Oh yes—that thing you sent me. Why the silly blighter should suppose it's necessary to stick in a storm at sea when it's quite obvious he hasn't seen one—he talks about a brig when he means a bark, and from the way he navigates her you'd say the wind blew all ways at once in the Atlantic."
I said it might for all I knew; and I asked him if he'd ever seen a storm at sea himself.
It seemed he had. He'd been ordered a sea-voyage for his health after his spell of printing; and his uncle, who was a sea-captain, took him with him to Hong-Kong in his ship. And he had been all through a cyclone in the Pacific.
I got him—with some difficulty, for he had become extremely shy—I got him to tell us about it.
He did. And by the time he had finished with us we had all been through a cyclone in the Pacific.
It was too much. The little beast could talk almost as well as he wrote.
A fellow who can write like Tasker Jevons has no business to talk at all.
Viola left soon after six. He had outstayed her. I went downstairs with her. When I came back to him he was still staring at the doorway she had passed through.
"Who's that girl?" he said.