"Have you seen my green parroquets?" said the lady.
"I haven't noticed any. Are they loose in the garden?" As though they would have been! But Mr. Challis wasn't in earnest.
"Not that I know of! Did you see any?" She had taken him quite seriously, and he had to explain.
"It was my ill-judged facetiousness," said he. "I meant I had been nowhere except in the garden."
"Oh, I see! You quite frightened me. They are such nice little people. Come in and look at them." But Mr. Challis felt that he would have to practise a certain discretion in his accustomed modes of speech, one of which was a perverse gravity over an obvious absurdity. But he had long given up expecting insight into this from Marianne, the impossible wife. Why should he, then, from this young woman, to whom he and his ways were quite a novelty? Besides, we had to consider the individualities of that strange creature, the human Toff. Mr. Challis reflected that absurd tropes and inversions, without a smile, are the breath of life to cab and bus men. Perhaps William the Norman never put his royal tongue in his cheek: it may have been contrary to the Feudal System.
The little parroquets didn't wait for their proprietor and this new gentleman to come into their palace. The moment they heard them they came with a wild rush into an outside cage. But, being out, they took no notice of their disturbers—none whatever! They conversed about them, clewed side by side on a long perch, with a stunning and unhesitating volubility that made the brain reel; a shrill, intolerable prestissimo of demisemiquavers on one note that pierced the drum of the ear like a rain of small steel shot. They had come to so exactly the same conclusion, so it seemed, as they all repeated it at once, first to right, then to left—had so precisely the same opinion about their visitors, that it was hardly necessary to dwell upon it so long, Mr. Challis thought.
"Are they sweet, or are they not?" was what his companion said.
Challis admitted the sweetness—or possible sweetness—of their dispositions. But he took exception to their voices. He would have preferred these to be more like Cordelia's. The nice little people kept up such a fire of comment, although Miss Arkroyd was now supplying them with cherries, that Challis could hardly hear what she was saying. But he gathered that it was eulogy of the way in which he had referred to the voice of Cordelia and King Lear's description of it, in one of his novels. Only it seemed to him that she was putting the saddle on the wrong horse—ascribing the passage to the wrong book, for she mentioned the "Spendthrift's Legacy," the first work that introduced him to his public. As is frequently the case, this book continued to be the one he was most connected with by non-readers of his works, for all that many more recent ones had had a much larger circulation.
"Are you sure it isn't in 'The Epidermis'?" he asked.
"What isn't?"