“Ah well, Thackeray, and George Eliot,” said the young nobleman; “I haven’t read much of them.”
“Don’t you suppose they know about society?” asked Bessie Alden.
“Oh, I daresay they know; they were so very clever. But these fashionable novels,” said Lord Lambeth, “they are awful rot, you know.”
His companion looked at him a moment with her dark blue eyes, and then she looked down in the chasm where the water was tumbling about. “Do you mean Mrs. Gore, for instance?” she said presently, raising her eyes.
“I am afraid I haven’t read that, either,” was the young man’s rejoinder, laughing a little and blushing. “I am afraid you’ll think I am not very intellectual.”
“Reading Mrs. Gore is no proof of intellect. But I like reading everything about English life—even poor books. I am so curious about it.”
“Aren’t ladies always curious?” asked the young man jestingly.
But Bessie Alden appeared to desire to answer his question seriously. “I don’t think so—I don’t think we are enough so—that we care about many things. So it’s all the more of a compliment,” she added, “that I should want to know so much about England.”
The logic here seemed a little close; but Lord Lambeth, made conscious of a compliment, found his natural modesty just at hand. “I am sure you know a great deal more than I do.”
“I really think I know a great deal—for a person who has never been there.”