Then he told them some more. He did not, of course, know that one of his hearers could have told it to him, had she been willing to display her knowledge.
The fact was that Mr. Verinder, desirous of being well posted by the twelfth of next month, when the man would be here as his guest for dinner, had searched tables and shelves at the Reform Club in order to put things together. That most useful of all volumes, Who’s Who, did not as yet exist, but a sort of popular dictionary of biography gave Mr. Verinder all that he wanted, and very much in the modern style. In this compendium he gleaned such essential details as: “Emerged at Shark Bay on the northern coast, sole survivor of the party; Thanked by the Government of Queensland, 1885; Thanked by Governments of South Australia and New South Wales, gold medal of Royal Geographical Society, 1886; First Antarctic cruise, resulting in discovery of the island since named Anthony Dyke Land, and charting of coast-line for five hundred miles, 1888; Establishing Furthest South record”—and so on.
Also Mr. Verinder had been to Mudie’s Library and borrowed that book, A Walk in the Andes. He read it after dinner.
They sat upstairs in what they called the music-room—the room that comprised the full width of the house, the largest and best room, with the pictures by Long, Poynter, and Alma Tadema. The Leaders were in the room behind; you reached it through those folding doors, now of course closed. Naturally all the light was not turned on, but there was full and sufficient radiance throughout the little camp that the diminished family formed on the stretching desert of parquetry.
Mrs. Verinder, wearing mauve brocade, occupied a sofa and dozed over the newspaper; Mr. Verinder had taken the very easiest chair and settled himself in it with many changes of position, as if determined to perform the impossible task of making it still easier; Emmeline sat upon a lowish stool, her pretty hair darkly lustrous in the soft orange glow of the lamps as she bent her head over a piece of embroidery and made minute stitches slowly and very neatly. From time to time she raised her eyes to glance at the book in her father’s hands, noticing how old and shabby it looked with the edge of the cloth binding broken and the librarian’s ugly label loose at one corner. She had a lovely clean new copy upstairs in her room—with the portrait-cover intact, and her own name and the author’s compliments written in a slap-dash hand on the title page.
“They told me at the club,” said Mr. Verinder, half closing his book, “that there’s a strong touch of Baron Munchausen about this.”
“Did you speak?” said Mrs. Verinder, raising herself and stooping to pick up the newspaper.
Mr. Verinder repeated his words.
“Munchausen,” murmured Mrs. Verinder drowsily.