CONVERSATION IN NOVELS
A GREAT many years ago, when I was a little girl, I used to know a dear, placid, sunny-tempered old lady who was stone-deaf and an insatiable novel-reader. She always came to our house bearing a black bag which held her jointed ear-trumpet, and she always left it with a borrowed novel under her arm. As she had reached that comfortable period of life when a book is as easily forgotten as read, our slender library supplied all her demands, on the same principle of timely reappearance which makes an imposing stage army out of two dozen elusive supernumeraries. She had a theory of selection all her own, and to which she implicitly trusted. She glanced over a story very rapidly, and if it had too many solid, page-long paragraphs—reflections, descriptions, etc.—she put it sadly but steadfastly aside. If, on the contrary, it was well broken
59
