"I beg your pardon. I—I am very silly this morning. Something has gone to my head. I really don't think I'd better advise you about anything to read. I—"
"Oh," she interrupted, already full of forgiveness, since it was not in her nature to be cruel for more than a moment at a time, "but you must. I am really desperate. All I ask is that you do not urge a fashionable book, a book of the day, or a book that should be in the library of every lady. I am afraid of those books. They are like the bores one turns a corner to avoid."
"You make advice harder and harder. Is it possible you really want a book to read, rather than to talk about?"
"I really do," she admitted, "I told you I had no thought about the fashion."
"You are like a figure from the Middle Ages," he said, "with your notion about books."
"Am I so very wrinkled?" she asked. She put her hand to her veil, with a gesture of solicitous inquiry. "To be young," she sighed, with a pout, "and yet to seem old. I am quite a tragedy."
"A goddess," he murmured, "but not of tragedy." He laughed sharply, and took a book from the table, using it to keep his eyes from the witchery of her as he continued: "Don't you see why I'm talking such nonsense? If it meant prolonging the glimpse of you, there's no end, simply no end, to the rubbish I could talk!"
"And no beginning," she put in, "to your sincerity."
"Oh, I don't know. One still has fits and starts of it! There's no telling what might not be done; it might come back to one, like childishness in old age." He put down the book, and looked at her in something like appeal. "There is such a thing as a sincerity one is ashamed of, that one hides, and disguises, and that the world refuses to see. The world? The world always means an individual. In this case the world is—"
"The world is yours, like Monte Cristo," she interposed, "how embarassed you must feel. The responsibility must be enervating! I have always thought the clever thing for Monte Cristo to have done was to lose the world; to hide it where nobody could find it again." She tapped her boot with her parasol, charmingly impatient. "I suppose," she sighed, "I shall have to ask that stupid clerk for a book, after all. He looks as if he would far rather sell them by weight."