"More than ever," she replied, gaily.
"I admire your loyalty, though I regret to say that I am still unable to share your taste."
"It isn't a matter of taste," she returned. "It depends on what one is looking for in a play or a novel."
She smiled with the air of one abstaining from a fruitless discussion
"She's a blue-stocking," I said to myself. "Women of this kind are usually doomed to be old maids." And yet she drew me with a magnetic force that seemed to be beyond my power of resistance
It was evident that she enjoyed the discussion and the fact that it was merely a pretext for the lawyer to feast his eyes on her
I wondered why a bald-headed man with a lone tuft of hair did not repel her
A younger brother of Shapiro's, a real-estate broker, joined us. He also was bald-headed, but his baldness formed a smaller patch than the lawyer's
The two brothers did most of the talking, and, among other things, they informed Miss Tevkin and myself that they were graduates of the City College. With a great display of reading and repeatedly interrupting each other they took up the cudgels for the "good old school." I soon discovered, however, that their range was limited to a small number of authors, whose names they uttered with great gusto and to whom they returned again and again. These were Victor Hugo, Dumas, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Coleridge, Edgar Poe, and one or two others. If the lawyer added a new name, like Walter Pater, to his list, the real-estate man would hasten to trot out De Quincey, for example. For the rest they would parade a whole array of writers rather than refer to any one of them in particular. The more they fulminated and fumed and bullied Miss Tevkin the firmer grew my conviction that they had scarcely read the books for which they seemed to be ready to lay down their lives
Miss Tevkin, however, took them seriously. She followed them with the air of a "good girl "listening to a lecture by her mother or teacher