'It's only because I've finished with him,' said Mrs. Jewks apologetically. 'Now I want something different.'
'Dolly and I,' explained Mrs. Barnes to me, 'don't always see alike. I have a theory that one doesn't finish with the Immortals.'
'Would you put Thackeray—' I began diffidently.
Mrs. Barnes stopped me at once.
'Our father,' she said—again my hands instinctively wanted to fold—'who was an excellent judge, indeed a specialist if I may say so, placed him among the Immortals. Therefore I am content to leave him there.'
'But isn't that filial piety rather than—' I began again, still diffident but also obstinate.
'In any case,' interrupted Mrs. Barnes, raising her hand as though I were the traffic, 'I shall never forget the influence he and the other great writers of the period had upon the boys.'
'The boys?' I couldn't help inquiring, in spite of this being an interrogation.
'Our father educated boys. On an unusual and original system. Being devoid of the classics, which he said was all the better because then he hadn't to spend any time remembering them, he was a devoted English linguist. Accordingly he taught boys English,—foreign boys, because English boys naturally know it already, and his method was to make them minutely acquainted with the great novels,—the great wholesome novels of that period. Not a French, or Dutch, or Italian boy but went home—'
'Or German,' put in Mrs. Jewks. 'Most of them were Germans.'