“I agree with you, Sir Walter!” cried Mr Norrell. “Indeed I do!”

Strange’s admiration for Mr Norrell was of a more restrained nature. Norrell’s dull conversation and oddities of behaviour continued to grate upon his nerves; and at about the same time as Mr Norrell was praising Strange to Sir Walter, Strange was complaining of Norrell to Arabella.

“Even now I scarcely know what to make of him. He is, at one and the same time, the most remarkable man of the Age and the most tedious. Twice this morning our conversation was interrupted because he thought he heard a mouse in the room – mice are a particular aversion of his. Two footmen, two maids and I moved all the furniture about looking for the mouse, while he stood by the fireplace, rigid with fear.”

“Has he a cat?” suggested Arabella. “He should get a cat.”

“Oh, but that is quite impossible! He hates cats even more than mice. He told me that if he is ever so unlucky as to find himself in the same room as a cat, then he is sure to be all over red pimples within an hour.”

It was Mr Norrell’s sincere wish to educate his pupil thoroughly, but the habits of secrecy and dissimulation which he had cultivated all his life were not easily thrown off. On a day in December, when snow was falling in large, soft flakes from heavy, greenish-grey clouds, the two magicians were seated in Mr Norrell’s library. The slow drifting motion of the snow outside the windows, the heat of the fire and the effects of a large glass of sherry-wine which he had been so ill-advised as to accept when Mr Norrell offered it, all combined to make Strange very heavy and sleepy. His head was supported upon his hand and his eyes were almost closing.

Mr Norrell was speaking. “Many magicians,” he said, steepling his hands, “have attempted to confine magical powers in some physical object. It is not a difficult operation and the object can be any thing the magician wishes. Trees, jewels, books, bullets, hats have all been employed for this purpose at one time or another.” Mr Norrell frowned hard at his fingertips. “By placing some of his power in whatever object he chuses, the magician hopes to make himself secure from those wanings of power, which are the inevitable result of illness and old age. I myself have often been severely tempted to do it; my own skills can be quite overturned by a heavy cold or a bad sore throat. Yet after careful consideration I have concluded that such divisions of power are most ill-advised. Let us examine the case of rings. Rings have long been considered peculiarly suitable for this sort of magic by virtue of their small size. A man may keep a ring continually upon his finger for years, without exciting the smallest comment – which would not be the case if he shewed the same attachment to a book or a pebble – and yet there is scarcely a magician in history who, having once committed some of his skill and power to a magic ring, did not somehow lose that ring and was put to a world of trouble to get it back again. Take for example, the twelfth-century Master of Nottingham, whose daughter mistook his ring of power for a common bauble, put it on her finger, and went to St Matthew’s Fair. This negligent young woman …”