"Haven't you?" he answered reflectively. "I read one the other day, and, thanks I suppose to my own old-fashionedness and sentimentality, I quite liked it."
"Not really! What was it?"
"It was called, I think, 'The Under Secretary.'"
She nodded, "Yes, that's one of the best ones, and you know it used to be very popular. The later ones are awful, and, oh, John," the girl's beautiful face was filled with real sympathy, "'Lord Effingham' was perfectly dreadful—you know she tried to modernise it—you never read such hopeless stuff in your life."
"Yes, I looked at that one day somewhere. It struck me as being very pathetic, Grisel."
She shrugged her shoulders. "I suppose so, but then lots of other writers have changed with the times—advanced I mean—only mother seems to have stuck back in the eighties somewhere. It is not so much that her stories are bad," she went on with an air of disinterested criticism that rather jarred on her hearer, "it is the way she tells them that is so—so hopelessly out of fashion. Why just look at Marjory Brendon, and Miss Thirsk and Eugene and Olive Parker, their books are just as hopeless as mother's from a literary point of view, but they sell like anything because they're modern."
"Yes, I am not much of a novel reader," he said, "and when I do read a novel I like the old ones, Dickens and Thackeray and so on, but I must say I do not see much of the modern ones that are considered literary. The two or three I have struck have been either deadly dull in their wealth of utterly unattractive details, or so filthy that they ought to be burnt; that book Paul lent me, for instance, 'Reek,' is not fit for any decent young woman to read."
Grisel nodded, "Yes, it is horrid. I began it, but mother wouldn't let me finish it. I love 'Haycocks,' don't you?"
He shook his head. "No. Of course it is beautifully written, but people with such undeveloped minds and such lack of knowledge of anything except turnips and sheep, don't interest me."
"That is the one my mother likes. Yes, I know what you mean about the turnips," the girl added thoughtfully, "but I suppose it is a perfect picture of the lives of such people. It is selling splendidly. I like 'Bess Knighthood' better, only I don't believe any family could be so horrid to each other. Yet it is told in an odd, attractive way. Mother couldn't bear it, yet it got the 1,000 dollar prize. 'Young Bears at Play' was the book I liked best of all. Oliver gave us those two, and I laughed till I was limp over it. Betterton is a funny man."