only said, "What queer correspondents you have! And what a charming impression of me you have given them! Am I as hateful as that?"
It isn't difficult to say complimentary things to Cornelia. The difficulty is not to say them. But I make it a practice not to answer rhetorical questions. They divert one from one's point. "Please remember," I said, carving my accents on the air with my crabtree stick and looking straight ahead, "please remember that this is not my portrait of you, but only the comment of one woman upon the image of another woman reflected in the eyes of a man who has worn spectacles for many years. But I have another letter—from a novelist; he has a quite different theory of you."
"Is it nice?" asked Cornelia, with a demipirouette and the instinctive capricious smile of a very pretty woman about to step before a mirror. "You should tell me something very nice to offset the spitefulness of that horrid person. But what a silly question! Your letter is from a novelist; so of course it isn't nice. Is it?"
"No," I replied, "I'm afraid it isn't nice—in your sense of the word; but it is interesting—in my sense of the word. I call a thing interesting, you see, when it seems to be earnestly pointing in
