Yet it struck Oliver Constable that the Polleys were at the level of civilisation when the theatre, if not abused and tabooed, would have naturally come in as an effective instrument in their training. He arrived at the conclusion as he formed one of the audience to the mimicry which ’Mily Polley, who was proud of her gift, was sometimes tempted to practise before her friends and acquaintances, in addition to her family; as he took notice of the nicknames which abounded in her vocabulary in about an equal degree to that in which they flourished in Jack Dadd’s speech; and as Oliver observed the glee with which the girl utilised any exceptionally silly or stupid person who had the misfortune to enter her circle, making him or her serve for a temporary butt. The last was grievously disloyal, and the worst thing was that nobody—neither the mistress nor the master of the house, not even ’Liza, who was certainly gentler than the others, who sometimes read a little from choice, and who was therefore under the impression that she had culture—recognised the disloyalty. But the mimicry was an intellectual effort a shade in advance of the bald individual experiences, the tittle-tattle purely peddling, or more or less mischievous, which constituted the staple of the Polleys’ conversation, and was just such an effort as the theatre might have spurred on and supplemented. Oliver imagined the Polleys might have liked to go to a respectable theatre which was not under an ecclesiastical ban, might have enjoyed a broad farce, and relished and profited so far by one of the homelier order of tragedies.