“Tell me, Mar,” she would say (and here it must be explained, that when she called him by the first syllable of his first name, she was in a dreamy, amorous, acquiescent mood, domestic, languid a little, as if spiced logs were burning, and it was evening, yet not time to dress, and a thought wet perhaps outside, enough to make the leaves glisten, but a nightingale might be singing even so among the azaleas, two or three dogs barking at distant farms, a cock crowing⁠—all of which the reader should imagine in her voice)⁠—“Tell me, Mar,” she would say, “about Cape Horn.” Then Shelmerdine would make a little model on the ground of the Cape with twigs and dead leaves and an empty snail shell or two.