"Oh, the one about Mr. Pendennis is the prettiest," she answered promptly, "I should have liked the man that made that book the best. But Mr. Dickens knows about more things. He makes more different kinds of people." "Thackeray has been called cynical," I suggested. "What is that, Jerry?" I explained, and she shook her head. "O no, that is not cynical. That is the way things are, Jerry. Only everybody does not say so." "Do you think," I asked, "that people really talk the way Mr. Micawber talks? I never heard anybody. And certainly nobody ever talked like his wife." "No," she said thoughtfully, "I never did, either. But there must be a good many people _like_ them, Jerry, I am sure. And if they knew as many long words as Mr. Dickens, that is the way they _would_ talk, I think." I have never heard a better criticism of the literary giant of the nineteenth century. She never made the slightest secret of her affection for me nor of our thorough comprehension of each other and our similarity of tastes. Quiet always, or almost always, with Roger, with me she chattered like a bird, and I could give her opinion on many matters of which he knew nothing. "Jerry and I like Botticelli and caviar sandwiches and street songs and Egypt, and Roger does not," she told Clarence King once--I can hear him roar now. "I can talk better to you than to Roger," she confided to me one day on the rocks; "if it were the custom to have two husbands, Jerry, I should like you for the other--but it is not," she added mournfully. I agreed to this with regret and she went on thoughtfully. "You see, Roger would not like it, even if it _was_ the custom, so I could not, anyway." "That is very amiable of you," I said. "It is strange how I always think of what he would like," she added, with perfect sincerity, I am sure. "One day when he would not let me have any more bread--it was so bad for my voice, you know--I got very angry and spoke crossly to him, but still he would not, and I told him that since he did not want me to sing he had better let me spoil my voice, if I wanted to--and you would think he would, would you not, Jerry?" "No," I answered soberly, "no, Margarita, I wouldn't. He knew you really wanted your voice more than the bread, so he gave you what you wanted." "Yes. But that day I was so angry, I planned how much more free I should be if he were to die--was it not terrible, Jerry?--and then I got so interested I could not stop, and I made a dying sickness for him like my father's, and Miss Buxton came, and then I got a black frock like Hester when my father died, and then we--you and I--made a grave for him with my father's grave on the little point, and then (this was all in my mind, you see, Jerry) I was so sad I cried and cried--as I do in _Marguerite_, all over my cheeks, and then, what do you think?"