Some people say they can distinguish between a written and a spoken style, but this depends a good deal on the art of the speaker. Churchill could give a colloquial tone to a ready-written sentence, and could speak it with an off-hand grace, a carelessness which defied all suspicion of preparation; and the look, and pause, and precipitation--each and all came in aid of the actor’s power of perfecting the illusion. If you had heard and seen him, you would have believed that, in speaking this passage, the thought of the _Fata Morgana_ rose in his mind at the instant, and that, seeing it pleased you, and pleased with it himself, encouraged by your look of intelligence, and borne along by your sympathy, the eloquent man followed his own idea with a happiness more than care, admirable in conversation. A few days afterwards, Helen was very much surprised to find her admired sentence word for word in a book, from which Churchill’s card fell as she opened it. Persons without a name Horace treated as barbarians who did not know the value of their gold; and he seemed to think that, if they chanced to possess rings and jewels, they might be plucked from them without remorse, and converted to better use by some lucky civilised adventurer. Yet in his most successful piracies he was always haunted by the fear of discovery, and he especially dreaded the acute perception of Lady Davenant; he thought she suspected his arts of appropriation, and he took the first convenient opportunity of sounding her opinion on this point. “How I enjoy,” said he to Lady Cecilia “telling a good story to you, for you never ask if it is a fact. Now, in a good story, no one sticks to absolute fact; there must be some little embellishment. No one would send his own or his friend’s story into the world without ‘putting a hat on its head, and a stick into its hand,’” Churchill triumphantly quoted; this time he did not steal. “But,” said Lady Davenant, “I find that even the pleasure I have in mere characteristic or humorous narration is heightened by my dependence on the truth--the character for truth--of the narrator.” Not only Horace Churchill, but almost every body present, except Helen, confessed that they could not agree with her. The character for truth of the story-teller had nothing to do with his story, unless it was _historique_, or that he was to swear to it. “And even if it were _historique_,” cried Horace, buoyed up at the moment by the tide in his favour, and floating out farther than was prudent--“and even if it were _historique_, how much pleasanter is graceful fiction than grim, rigid truth; and how much more amusing in my humble opinion!”