"Not even CONRAD?" I pursued. "No one has so described the calms and storms of the Pacific."
No, she remembered no story called Conrad.
I was about to explain that CONRAD was the writer, not the written; but it seemed a waste of words, and we fell into a stillness broken only by the sound of knife and fork.
"Hang it! you shall talk," I said to myself; and then aloud, "Tell me all about copra. I have longed to know what copra is; how it grows, what it looks like, what it is for."
"You have come to the wrong person," she replied, with wide eyes. "I never heard of it. Or did you say 'cobra'? Of course I know what a cobra is—it's a snake. I've seen them at the Zoo."
I put her right. "Copra, the stuff that the traders in the South Seas deal in."
"I never heard of it," she said. "But then why should I? I know nothing about the South Seas."
My stock fell thirty points and I crumbled bread nervously, hoping for something sensible to say; but at this moment "half-time" mercifully set in. My partner on the other side turned to me suavely and asked if I thought the verses in Abraham Lincoln were a beauty or a blemish; and with the assistance of the London stage, the flight to America, Mrs. FULTON'S Blight, Mr. WALPOLE'S Secret City and the prospects of the new Academy, I sailed serenely into port. She was as easy and agreeable a woman as that other was difficult, and before she left for the drawing-room she had invited me to lunch and I had accepted.
As I said Good-night to my hostess I asked why she had told me that my first partner had been in the South Seas. She said that she had said nothing of the sort; what she had said was that during the War she had been stationed with her husband, Colonel Blank, at Southsea.