Oh, I’d very much rather you didn’t know. I shouldn’t like you ever to read one of them. They’re all awful: still, they keep the pot boiling, you know. But tell me, what do you read?
TOPSY.
Mostly history, and philosophy, and a little criticism and psychology, and lots of poetry.
ASTON.
My dear young lady! how wonderful, how altogether unexpectedly splendid. (CAIN emerges with the third brother, SIR JASPER, who is a paler, thinner, more sinister and aristocratic ASTON.)
CAIN.
Nyum nyum nyum. . . .
SIR JASPER.
What a perfect sentence that was of yours, Aston: quite Henry Jamesian! “My dear young lady”—as though you were forty years her senior; and the rare old-worldliness of that “altogether unexpectedly splendid”! Admirable. I don’t remember your ever employing quite exactly this opening gambit before: but of course there were things very like it. (To CAIN.) What a nasty spectacle you are, Cain, gnashing your teeth like that!