“You are reading,” he said. “Am I in the way?”
She looked up.
“Oh, no!” she replied, gently. “I am not reading seriously—it is only what I call a ‘peep-in’ book.”
He took it from her hand.
“Verse, I see!” he remarked. “Selections from the productions of various verse-mongers. Well!... and you ‘peep in’ at the general show! Not a bad expression that!—a ‘peep-in’ book. Most books merit no more than a ‘peep-in.’” Here he turned over the pages. “Dear, dear! It is astonishing that so much rhymed rubbish still goes on being printed! Dear, dear!
“‘As the flight of a river
That flows to the sea,
So my soul rushes ever
In tumult to thee!’
Bulwer’s twaddle!—Lytton Bulwer or Bulwer Lytton! Curious person!—How he could reconcile his conscience to rhyming ‘ever’ with ‘river’ I cannot imagine! And of course his soul didn’t ‘rush in tumult’ to any one. He was the worst husband in the world,—Rosina Lady Lytton led a miserable life with him.”
Sentimentalist Sylvia smiled.
“I quite believe it!” she said. “Poets are all the same—they write about love because they don’t feel it. If they felt it, they couldn’t write about it.”
“Wise child!” And the Philosopher, with his most attractively kindly glance, closed the book and returned it to her. “You really say very apt things now and then!”