"No," his wife corrected him, "what a man thinks she can."
"I suppose," said Mr. Triscoe, unexpectedly, "that we're like the English in our habit of going off about a book like a train of powder."
"If you'll say a row of bricks," March assented, "I'll agree with you. It's certainly Anglo-Saxon to fall over one another as we do, when we get going. It would be interesting to know just how much liking there is in the popularity of a given book."
"It's like the run of a song, isn't it?" Kenby suggested. "You can't stand either, when it reaches a given point."
He spoke to March and ignored Triscoe, who had hitherto ignored the rest of the table.
"It's very curious," March said. "The book or the song catches a mood, or feeds a craving, and when one passes or the other is glutted—"
"The discouraging part is," Triscoe put in, still limiting himself to the Marches, "that it's never a question of real taste. The things that go down with us are so crude, so coarsely spiced; they tickle such a vulgar palate—Now in France, for instance," he suggested.
"Well, I don't know," returned the editor. "After all, we eat a good deal of bread, and we drink more pure water than any other people. Even when we drink it iced, I fancy it isn't so bad as absinthe."
The young bride looked at him gratefully, but she said, "If we can't get ice-water in Europe, I don't know what Mr. Leffers will do," and the talk threatened to pass among the ladies into a comparison of American and European customs.
Burnamy could not bear to let it. "I don't pretend to be very well up in French literature," he began, "but I think such a book as 'The Maiden Knight' isn't such a bad piece of work; people are liking a pretty well-built story when they like it. Of course it's sentimental, and it begs the question a good deal; but it imagines something heroic in character, and it makes the reader imagine it too. The man who wrote that book may be a donkey half the time, but he's a genius the other half. By-and-by he'll do something—after he's come to see that his 'Maiden Knight' was a fool—that I believe even you won't be down on, Mr. March, if he paints a heroic type as powerfully as he does in this book."