A pleasing gift

Aye. She’s always had the priceless gift of pleasing, has Elspeth, and making people laugh — for she’s a damned funny woman when she wants to be, a top-hole mimic, and all the more engaging because she plainly hasn't got two brains to rub together. “Never see her but it sets me in humour,” Palmerston used to say. That was her talent, to make folk happy.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.225, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


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Cf. Hollywood

…she had decided a career as a mistress was no great shakes, and had determined to try her luck on stage — she’d been born with a talent for mimicry, and being vicious, immoral, and vain, she had taken to the theatre like a pirate to plunder.


Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, p.201, Harper Collins, 1995.



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