A lightning grimace swept over Miss Bullace's square features.
"Ah, ah, ah!" laughed Mr Crimble, "I am rebuked, I am in the corner! Another scone, Lady Pollacke?" Mrs Crimble was a beautiful old lady; but it was with a rather unfriendly and feline eye that she continued to regard me; and I wondered earnestly if Fanny had ever noticed this characteristic.
"The fact of the matter is," said Lady Pollacke, with conviction, "our memories rust for want of exercise. Where, physically speaking, would you be, Mr Crimble, if you hadn't the parish to tramp over? Precisely the same with the mind. Every day I make a personal effort to commit some salient fact to memory—such a fact, for a trivial example, as the date of the Norman Conquest. The consequence is, my husband tells me, I am a veritable encyclopædia. My father took after me. Alexander the Great, I have read somewhere, could address by name—though one may assume not Christian name—every soldier in his army. Thomas Babington Macaulay, a great genius, poor man, knew by heart every book he had ever read. A veritable mine of memory. On the other hand, I once had a parlour-maid, Sarah Jakes, who couldn't remember even the simplest of her duties, and if it hadn't been for my constant supervision would have given us port with the soup."
"Perfectly, perfectly true," assented Miss Bullace. "Now mine is a verbal memory. My mind is a positive magnet for words. Method, of course, is everything. I weld. Let us say that a line of a poem terminates with the word bower, and the next line commences with she, I commit these to memory as one word—Bowershee—and so master the sequence. My old friend, Lady Bovill Porter—we were schoolfellows—recommended this method. It was Edmund Kean's, I fancy, or some other well-known actor's. How else indeed, could a great actor realize what he was doing? Word-perfect, you see, he is free."
"Exactly, exactly," sagely nodded Mr Crimble, but with a countenance so colourless and sad that it called back to my remembrance the picture of a martyr—of St Sebastian, I think—that used to hang up in my mother's room.
"And you?"—I discovered Lady Pollacke was rather shrilly inquiring of me. "Is yours a verbal memory like Miss Bullace's; or are you in my camp?"
"Ah, there," cried Mr Crimble, tilting back his chair in sudden enthusiasm. "Miss M. positively puts me to shame. And poetry, Miss Bullace; even your wonderful repertory!"
"You mean Miss M. recites?" inquired Miss Bullace, leaning forward over her lap. "But how entrancing! It is we, then, who are birds of a feather. And how I should adore to hear a fellow-enthusiast. Now, won't you, Lady Pollacke, join your entreaties to mine? Just a stanza or two!"
A chill crept through my bones. I had accepted Lady Pollacke's invitation, thinking my mere presence would be entertainment enough, and because I knew it was important to see life, and immensely important to see Mr Crimble. In actual fact it seemed I had hopped for a moment not out of my cage, but merely, as Fanny had said, into another compartment of it.