“Undoubtedly. When I read purely for pleasure I read our own. And these are dull work after them. They lack the brilliancy, truth, incisiveness and humour that characterise ours. But there—why do I try to compare them?”
“Yet some of these are very good?”
“Oh, yes,” she answered with a contemptuous curl of her lips. “And very good things are like very bad things, very uninteresting.”
“You are hard to please.”
“Not at all, but I like if possible to be pleased in a particular way.”
“I see. My only wonder is that since you are undoubtedly interested in the world you do not take more pains to make your likes and dislikes known.”
“Interested in which world?” she questioned.
“Earth.”
She now got up laughing and came and sat down on a chair by the fire opposite me.
“I’ll leave the papers to-day, they make me melancholy, they are so very truthful. There’s one that says if you want to shake hands with three duchesses, five countesses, and the very cream of society, you may do it for three guineas.”