“That is the exception, and is not very notable, like Lowell’s sustained and delightful verbal play; the rest are no better or worse off—the lesser larks, I mean.”
“Yes, and Shelley has no humor, and Keats’s attempts are only illustrations of the fact that editors don’t know where to draw the line.”
“How agreeable we are!” he said, laughing. He had the happy art of low-pitched laughter.
“That way of saying we agree,” she said, “would delight Aunt Anne.”
“And do you find time up here to read much?” he went on. “I cannot. The hours go by like the water, without freight of thought.”
“Not much,” she returned. “I read very little here, although at home we are mighty consumers of books. I am as little fond of the needle as is my aunt, but one takes up a book lazily here as a sort of companion that does not insist on answers.”
“You seem to have provided a goodly ration,” he returned, looking about him.
“I am hardly responsible for this mob of books. My good mother is in despair over our accumulations, and my father declares that the house at home is a Noah’s ark of books after their kind.”
“And what kind?” said Carington, much pleased to get off so easily from what he had feared might be an importunate debtor.
“Oh, every kind! Of course, my good father’s legal books now and then drift away from their proper place. Then Jack collects voyages and ferocities by land and sea, and Dick will spend his last dime on books about beasts and plants. My dear Ned reads everybody’s books with entire impartiality. Aunt Anne must have digested libraries; but then she is not like anybody else. I hardly call it reading. She falls upon a book, and appears to look it over carelessly, and then, after you have read it with attention, you find that she knows twice as much about it as you do.”
“But that is very interesting. I judged from our little chat at breakfast that Miss Anne was out of the ranks of our commonplace world. And she reads widely?”
“Yes! We call her the ‘book-hawk.’ It is rare fun to see her pounce on a tempting volume.”
“She struck me, if I may venture to say so, as most interesting; but that there should remain this immense, ever active energy of appropriation with feeble health seems remarkable.”