Dear List,

Informations in "Ada, or Ardor" sometimes lead me into opposite lines of conjectures and often the paradox or the traps escape my conscious attention. Today I decided to share my curiosity with you and learn if other readers share this kind of puzzlement, or if it operates only with absendminded readers, like me.

It is well established that Van and Ada are brother and sister.

If anyone quizzed me about when and where they discovered that they were siblings, I'd answer that it happened while they were in Ardis, investigating together the attic.

We read, for example: " A girl was born on July 21, 1872, at Ardis, her putative father’s seat in Ladore County, and for some obscure mnemonic reason was registered as Adelaida. Another daughter, this time Dan’s very own, followed on January 3, 1876." (I wonder, though, why was  the "two kids’ best find" something that "came from another carton in a lower layer of the past."? Their "best find" in relation to what? Their parentage?)

We have the suggestion that this was the first time the two had confronted together the issue of their birthdates and fatherhood: "The two young discoverers of that strange and sickening treasure commented upon it as follows: ‘I deduce,’ said the boy, ‘three main facts: that not yet married Marina and her married sister hibernated in my lieu de naissance; that Marina had her own Dr Krolik, pour ainsi dire; and that the orchids came from Demon who preferred to stay by the sea, his dark-blue great-grandmother.’" Ada's words that comes right after, also states: " ‘I can add,’ said the girl, ‘that the petal belongs to the common Butterfly Orchis; that my mother was even crazier than her sister; and that the paper flower so cavalierly dismissed is a perfectly recognizable reproduction of [...] the Bear-Foot, B,E,A,R, my love, not my foot or yours, or the Stabian flower girl’s..."

And yet, in the next breath and line Ada adds: " — an allusion, which your father, who, according to Blanche, is also mine, would understand like this’ (American finger-snap)."

So we see that many servants, Blanche included -  and Ada herself - already knew of this little secret long before Ada and Van climbed up to the attic. It was clearly something that only Van ignored while he (as usual) went off onto a side issue ( which will never, really, be a "side issue" anyway). 

Did Ada's words, as they were placed in her mouth at that moment, reveal that there were never "two" discoverers of strange treasures but only one? It this a "delayed-action" information deliberately set by the narrator and to what purpose does it serve?