bannocks are as alike as mine!'

Or I may be roused from my writing by her cry that I am making
strange faces again. It is my contemptible weakness that if I say
a character smiled vacuously, I must smile vacuously; if he frowns
or leers, I frown or leer; if he is a coward or given to
contortions, I cringe, or twist my legs until I have to stop
writing to undo the knot. I bow with him, eat with him, and gnaw
my moustache with him. If the character be a lady with an
exquisite laugh, I suddenly terrify you by laughing exquisitely.
One reads of the astounding versatility of an actor who is stout
and lean on the same evening, but what is he to the novelist who is
a dozen persons within the hour? Morally, I fear, we must
deteriorate - but this is a subject I may wisely edge away from.

We always spoke to each other in broad Scotch (I think in it
still), but now and again she would use a word that was new to me,
or I might hear one of her contemporaries use it. Now is my
opportunity to angle for its meaning. If I ask, boldly, what was
chat word she used just now, something like 'bilbie' or 'silvendy'?
she blushes, and says she never said anything so common, or hoots!
it is some auld-farrant word about which she can tell me nothing.
But if in the course of conversation I remark casually, 'Did he
find bilbie?' or 'Was that quite silvendy?' (though the sense of
the question is vague to me) she falls into the trap, and the words
explain themselves in her replies. Or maybe to-day she sees
whither I am leading her, and such is her sensitiveness that she is
quite hurt. The humour goes out of her face (to find bilbie in
some more silvendy spot), and her reproachful eyes - but now I am
on the arm of her chair, and we have made it up. Nevertheless, I