"Heavens!" thought Lady Jim, with a charming smile, meaning nothing, "am I to be bored with another Arthur?"
"The black-letter edition," went on Miss Jaffray, in a loud and oratorical voice. "Most interesting. So sweet to think of those dear dead days, when knights went about as troubadours with guitars in steel armour, dying for queens of beauty."
"Delightful," assented Lady Jim, yawning at the dullness of the picture; "but"--with a disparaging glance at the lettering--"isn't it rather like reading a German newspaper? I prefer novels myself."
"So do I, when not in a poetic humour," shouted her companion. "All the old, old masters of fiction. Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Wilkie Collins. I love them all--every one."
"I seem to know those names," ventured Leah, carefully. "What did they write, Miss Jaffray?"
The spinster gasped. Brought up in a library, she could not understand this fashionable ignorance, which, truth to say, was partially assumed. Leah was by no means the ignoramus she made herself out to be. But, for the sake of business, she thought it judicious to foster Miss Jaffray's vanity by assuming an inferior position.
"Do you ever read?" asked Miss Jaffray, in the voice of Goliath challenging the army of Saul.
"Oh yes; society newspapers, and French novels."
"But they are so improper."
"Nothing amusing is improper to my mind," said Lady Jim, calmly; "and I really did skim through a page or two of Dickens. Horribly dull, I thought him."