“I said I couldn’t do anything until I knew the colour of Patricia’s hair and eyes.”
This took me aback, though it is quite in Tintinnabulum’s manner.
“How could that help?” I had to enquire instead of risking a move.
“I couldn’t get a beginning,” he insisted doggedly, “till I found out that.” (To this day I don’t know what he meant.)
“No difficulty in finding out from W. W.,” I said.
Here I was wrong. W. W. had no idea of the colour of his dear little sister’s eyes but presumed that, as he and she were twins, their eyes must be of the same hue. There followed a scene, undoubtedly worthy of some supreme artist, in which, by the light of a match, Tintinnabulum endeavoured to discover colour of W. W.’s eyes, W. W. being again unable to supply desired information. The match always going out just as Tintinnabulum was on the eve of discovery, it was decided by him that W. W. should write to his twin for particulars (letter dictated by Tintinnabulum). Patricia’s reply was, “Who is it that wants to know? Eyes too expressive to be blue, too lovely to be grey,” and it irritated the two seekers after truth.
“We didn’t ask her what colour they were not,” Tintinnabulum said to me witheringly, “but what colour they were.”
In the end, rather than bother any more with her, they risked putting her eyes down as browny black. This determined, Tintinnabulum apprized his client that Patricia was to write the letter that would make their mother happy. This nearly led to a rupture.
W. W. (sitting, as they say in the plays, though he might as well be standing): She can’t write a letter to mother when they are living in the same house.
Tintinnabulum (rising, because W. W. sat): It would be a letter to you.