When they were discoursing together about a work of history or biography, a bystander would have supposed that they had lived in the times of which the author treated, and had a personal acquaintance with every human being who was mentioned in his pages.

Pepys, Addison, Horace Walpole, Dr.Johnson, Madame de Genlis, the Duc de St.Simon, and the several societies in which those worthies moved, excited in their minds precisely the same sort of concern, and gave matter for discussions of exactly the same type, as most people bestow upon the proceedings of their own contemporaries.

The past was to them as the present, and the fictitious as the actual.

The older novels, which had been the food of their early years, had become part of themselves to such an extent that, in speaking to each other, they frequently employed sentences from dialogues in those novels to express the idea, or even the business, of the moment.

On matters of the street or of the household they would use the very language of Mrs.
Elton and Mrs.Bennet, Mr.Woodhouse, Mr.Collins, and John Thorpe, and the other inimitable actors on Jane Austen's unpretending stage: while they would debate the love affairs and the social relations of their own circle in a series of quotations from Sir Charles Grandison or Evelina.
The effect was at times nothing less than bewildering.