"Didn't you know?"
I couldn't catch his reply.
"When you were young I suppose you called older men 'sir'?"
"Of course."
"Do you think that at this moment you could repeat, say, half a page of The Hands of Esau?" (I had my reasons for choosing that book rather than another.)
"I think so."
"Will you try?"
"Shall you know if I'm right?"
"Near enough for the purpose, I think."
He puckered his brows and fixed his eyes on the road. He began to recite. The Hands of Esau had been written in or before 1912, and the year was now 1920. To remember even your own book textually eight years afterwards is something of a performance; but he was remembering, at nineteen, the words he had written at thirty-eight—a space of nearly twenty years. I stopped him, satisfied, but he himself immediately took up the running.