"So do I," he answered, instantly dropping his own wrongs. "But the glass bottles have glass marbles in them, which you can use; and so it's better to have them, because it doesn't matter so much about the taste after it's drunk."
She asked him concerning his work and he told her that he best liked history. She asked why, and he gave a curious reason.
"Because it tells you the truth, and you don't find good men always scoring and bad men always coming to grief. In history, good men come to grief sometimes and bad men score."
"But you can't always be sure what is good and what is bad," she argued.
"The people who write the histories don't worry you about that," he answered, "but just tell you what happened. And sometimes you are jolly glad when a beast gets murdered, or his throne is taken away from him; and sometimes you are sorry when a brave chap comes to grief, even though he may be bad."
"Some historians are not fair, though," she said. "Some happen to feel like you. They hate some people and some ideas, and always show them in an unfriendly light. If you write history, you must be tremendously fair and keep your own little whims out of it."
After their meal Estelle smoked a cigarette, much to Abel's interest.
"I never knew a girl could smoke," he said.
"Why not? Would you like one? I don't suppose a cigarette once in a way can hurt you."
"I've smoked thousands," he told her. "And a pipe, too, for that matter.
I smoked a cigar once. I found it and smoked it right through."