"Did Fifth Avenue not impress you?" inquired Pearl rather sweetly.
"Your Piccadilly—it is your Piccadilly, I believe—should be toned down," replied the Englishman graciously. "It is too loud. The glare of the sun is blinding and overheating, Miss Vial."
He spoke to my fiancée as though she were a bottle or an adjective, and I could not forbear to interpose mildly, "Miss Ve-al, Sir Charles."
"In England," returned Sir Charles, "it would be Vial or possibly Willy. I am told that in America you have an absurd custom of pronouncing words the way they are spelled. Is it not so, Miss Weal?"
"Yes," Pearl replied, "but——"
"On the contrary," said Sir Charles, "it is easier, much easier, to spell words the way they are not pronounced. The minute you begin to pronounce as you spell, it becomes impossible to spell correctly at all. Is it not so, your Grace?"
The Duke said that it was so. Moreover, he added admiringly that whatever Sir Charles said was so. Mrs. Radigan, with some of her native fire still smouldering, ventured to remark that she spelled entirely by sound and then had her secretary make the corrections, which amused her visitor immensely. When he had recovered his equanimity and polished his glass, he proceeded to demonstrate how absurd was her view.
"In England, Mrs. Lanigan, we have for centuries pronounced words the way they are not spelled. Don't you suppose that if we had not found it the best thing to do we should have changed?"
"But, my Lord—" began Mrs. Radigan.
"The question is not one which allows any argument at all, Mrs. Stranahan," said the solicitor. "We threshed it all over in England, long ago, and decided it."