After that she was more careful—which is the same as saying she was more careless of adhering to the scheme she had adopted. She felt that as he had now been put off the scent, she might run along as she pleased without there being a chance of his suspecting anything through her showing herself familiar with passage after passage.
Before she had got through more than a dozen pages she heard a creaking of the sofa—she trusted herself to glance in that direction and found that he was no longer reclining: he was sitting up and listening attentively. She continued reading without making a remark for a full hour. The sun had set, but the twilight was clear enough to allow of her seeing the print on the page before her for some time still; then the darkness seemed to fall all at once, and she laid the book down when she had come to the close of one of the letters.
“Candles,” he said. “Candles! Upon my word, the world is right for once: the stuff is good. We must have candles. Candles, I say!”
“Supper, say I,” cried Fanny. “I feel that I have need of bodily refreshment after such a task. Does it sound real to you, Daddy Crisp—all about the Young Lady who is about to enter the world?”
“Not merely does it sound real, it is real—it is reality,” he replied quickly. “The man who wrote what you have read has something of the genius of—of—now whom does he resemble, think you?—Richardson here and there, and in places, Fielding, it seems to me.”
“You suppose that ’tis written by a man?” she said.
“Why, of course, ’tis the work of a man,” he replied. “Where is the woman living that is capable of writing a single page of that book? What, have I gone to so much trouble in training you to understand what is bad and what is good in writing, to so little purpose, that you should have a doubt as to the sex of what you have just heard?”
“The sex of a book—a novel?”
“Why not? There are masculine books and there is feminine—trash. There you have the difference.”
“And you do not consider this to be—trash?”