“Oh, do let me come to you, then!” Mrs. Touchett cried; “anything for a change of air! I’m positively sick of the book and I can’t put it down. Can’t you sail us beyond its reach, Mr. Flamel?”
Flamel shook his head. “Not even with this breeze. Literature travels faster than steam nowadays. And the worst of it is that we can’t any of us give up reading; it’s as insidious as a vice and as tiresome as a virtue.”
“I believe it is a vice, almost, to read such a book as the ‘Letters,’” said Mrs. Touchett. “It’s the woman’s soul, absolutely torn up by the roots—her whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently didn’t care; who couldn’t have cared. I don’t mean to read another line; it’s too much like listening at a keyhole.”
“But if she wanted it published?”
“Wanted it? How do we know she did?”
“Why, I heard she’d left the letters to the man—whoever he is—with directions that they should be published after his death—”
“I don’t believe it,” Mrs. Touchett declared.
“He’s dead then, is he?” one of the men asked.
“Why, you don’t suppose if he were alive he could ever hold up his head again, with these letters being read by everybody?” Mrs. Touchett protested. “It must have been horrible enough to know they’d been written to him; but to publish them! No man could have done it and no woman could have told him to—”
“Oh, come, come,” Dresham judicially interposed; “after all, they’re not love-letters.”