Which was scarcely polite.
"Ouf!" Hermione sniffed, "I know! Place full of bottles and bad smells."
He smiled at that, and took it up with spirit.
"No room in your house so clean," he said. "And no place anywhere half so interesting." A laboratory was full of mystery; yes, and of romance—oh, naturally, not her kind.
What did he know about "her kind"? Hermione demanded.
Perhaps he knew more than we suspected. For, just as though he guessed that Hermione's name for him was "Scotch Granite," and that she lamented Barbara's always falling in love with such unromantic people, he scoffed at Hermione's conception of romance. "An ideal worthy of the servants' hall. A marble terrace by moonlight.... No? Well, then, the supper-room at the Carlton—Paris frocks, diamonds, a band banging away; and a thousand-pound motor-car waiting to whirl the happy pair away to bliss of the most expensive brand."
They went on to quarrel about novels. Hermione hated the gloomy kind. For Eric's benefit she added, "And the scientific kind."
"Exactly!" It was for her sort of "taste" that ample provision was made in the feuilleton of a certain paper.
Hermione was not a bit dashed. "You may look for romance in bottles if you like. For my part ..." she stuck out her chin.
"Well, oblige the company by telling us what you look for in a story?"