peechless.

Then she began.

She announced her intention of "wiping down the bloomin' 'all" with him,
and making it respectable; and, metaphorically speaking, that is what she
did. Her tongue hit him between the eyes, and knocked him down and
trampled on him. It curled round and round him like a whip, and then it
uncurled and wound the other way. It seized him by the scruff of his
neck, and tossed him up into the air, and caught him as he descended, and
flung him to the ground, and rolled him on it. It played around him like
forked lightning, and blinded him. It danced and shrieked about him like
a host of whirling fiends, and he tried to remember a prayer, and could
not. It touched him lightly on the sole of his foot and the crown of his
head, and his hair stood up straight, and his limbs grew stiff. The
people sitting near him drew away, not feeling it safe to be near, and
left him alone, surrounded by space, and language.

It was the most artistic piece of work of its kind that I have ever
heard. Every phrase she flung at him seemed to have been woven on
purpose to entangle him and to embrace in its choking folds his people
and his gods, to strangle with its threads his every hope, ambition, and
belief. Each term she put upon him clung to him like a garment, and
fitted him without a crease. The last name that she called him one felt
to be, until one heard the next, the one name that he ought to have been
christened by.

For five and three-quarter minutes by the clock she spoke, and never for
one instant did she pause or falter; and in the whole of that onslaught
there was only one weak spot.

That was when she offered to make a better man than he was out of a Guy
Fawkes and a lump of coal. You felt that one lump of coal would not have
been sufficient.

At the end, she gathered herself together for one supreme effort, and
hurled at him an insult so bitter with scorn so sharp with insight into
his career and character, so heavy with prophetic curse, that strong men
drew and held their breath while it passed over them, and women hid their
faces and shivered.

Then she folded her arms, and stood silent; and the house, from floor to
ceiling, rose and cheered her until there was no more breath left in its
lungs.

In that one night she stepped from oblivion into success. She is now a
famous "artiste."

But she does not call herself Signora Ballatino, and she does not play
upon the zithern. Her name