“I wonder,” said Felix, “if they are really more frank than English novels—the best of them. Defoe and Fielding were rather frank, you know.”
Gloria shrugged her pretty shoulders. “If there was anything like that in Defoe and Fielding, it escaped my innocent young mind when I read them.” She turned again to Tom. “They omit nothing—Nothing!”
“You excite my curiosity,” Tom said sceptically. “Please describe more specifically the Nothing which they omit.”
Gloria laughed, and sketched lightly and brightly the plot of one of the most outrageous new French novels—extreme, she admitted, even for France. “Every other chapter,” she said, “is one which the boldest English novelist would leave to your imagination. In this story, here it is, with, I assure you, a wealth of detail.”
“A wealth of words, rather, I suspect,” said Tom. “The same words that have done duty in the same French novels for a generation: volupté—exquise—baiser—baiser.... The same old thing, so far as I gather from your description, Gloria. That kind of eloquent rhetoric isn’t frankness,—at least not the kind of literary frankness that Felix and I are interested in.”
“Forgive me, Tom!” said Gloria, with mock humility. “My mistake! Here I have been going across the ocean in search of sensation, and all the while the real shock was waiting for me right here at home. In your novel you have doubtless outdone the puny efforts of these mere foreigners. What do they know about frankness? I abase myself, and repent in dust and ashes!”
“I really do think,” said Tom, “that you imagine the truth can be told only in French.”
“I suppose I was guilty of that foolish error. But I pine for enlightenment. Give me the truth—the Truth!—in my own native tongue!”
Tom shook his head. “I didn’t say I had tried to tell it.”
“Oh, don’t disappoint me that way, Tom. Surely you are not going to let these Frenchmen put it over on you! Don’t say that!”