...She astonished and mystified him by using expressions which she could scarcely have learned from any member of the household. It was not the jargon of the smart young people of the day which slipped easily from her lips, but the polite family slang of his own youth. For instance, she remarked one morning that Mead, the gardener, was a whale at pruning vines.
A whale! The expression took Everton back a very long way down the level road of the spent years; took him, indeed, to a nursery in a solid respectable house in a Belgravian square, where he had heard the word used in that same sense for the first time. His sister Gertrude, aged ten, notorious in those days for picking up loose expressions, announced that she was getting to be a whale at French. Yes, in those days an expert was a ‘whale’ or a ‘don’; not, as he is today, a ‘stout fellow’. But who was a ‘whale’ nowadays? It was years since he had heard the term.
‘Where did you learn to say that?’ he demanded in so strange a tone that Monica stared at him anxiously.
‘Isn’t it right?’ she asked eagerly. She might have been a child at a new school, fearful of not having acquired the fashionable phraseology of the place.
‘It is a slang expression,’ said the purist coldly. ‘It used to mean a person who was proficient in something. How did you come to hear it?’...