“No,” said Gilead, astonished.
“‘The Glow-worm in the Grass’?”
“No.”
“‘The Evanescence of Evadne’?”
“No.”
The stranger, with a supreme effort, sat up.
“A reader!” he exclaimed scornfully—“a reader! And you will be telling me next, I suppose, that you have never even heard of Cornelia Cox!”
“I am bound to confess that I never have,” said Gilead.
The stranger smacked his bill-hook into the block before him, and, with a mighty struggle, got to his feet.
“What?” he cried hoarsely: “Cornelia, the one, the peerless, the incomparable, the first novelist of her age—and he does not even know her name! O, in what nethermost depths of darkness is not the philistine of our generation capable of enclosing himself! Not to have heard of Cornelia Cox!”