human
How delightful it is! how altogether charming! and Margaret felt that she was included with the room in this admiration.
gpt
I told mamma that I was coming to see you this morning, even if I missed the Nestors' luncheon. I like to please myself sometimes. Mamma says I'm frivolous, but do you know --the girls were comfortably seated by the fire, and Carmen turned her sweet face and candid eyes to her companion--
human
I get dreadfully tired of all this going round and round. No, I don't even go to the Indigent Mothers' Home; it's part of the same thing, but I haven't any gift that way. Ah, you were reading--that novel.
gpt
Yes; I was trying to read it; I intend to read it.
human
Oh, we have had it! It's a little past now, but it has been all the rage. Everybody has read it; that is, I don't know that anybody has read it, but everybody has been talking about it. Of course somebody must have read it, to set the thing agoing. And it has been discussed to death. I sometimes feel as if I had changed my religion half a dozen times in a fortnight. But I haven't heard anything about it for a week. We have taken up the Hindoo widows now, you know.
gpt
And you do not read much in the city?
human
Yes; in the summer. That is, some do. There is a reading set. I don't know that they read much, but there is a reading set. You know, Miss Debree, that when a book is published--really published, as Mr. Henderson says--you don't need to read it. Somehow it gets into the air and becomes common property. Everybody hears the whole thing. You can talk about it from a notice. Of course there are some novels that one must read in order to understand human nature. Do you read French?
gpt
Yes; but not many French novels; I cannot.
human
Nor can I, said Carmen, with a sincere face.
gpt
They are too realistic for me. She was at the moment running over in her mind a
human
in a paper-covered novel turned down on her nightstand.
gpt
Mr. Henderson says that everybody condemns the French novels, and that people praise the novels they don't read.
human
You know Mr. Henderson very well?
gpt
Yes; we've known him a long time. He is the only man I'm afraid of.
human
Afraid of?
gpt
Well, you know he is a sort of Club man; that style of man provokes your curiosity, for you never can tell how much such men know. It makes you a little uneasy.