After luncheon most of them played Snooker, to the accompaniment of the gramophone, Anna and Jasper taking turns in changing the records.
Eben had hurt his hand, so he sat and talked to Teresa on the sofa.
It was a fact that had always both puzzled and annoyed her that he evidently enjoyed talking to her.
“Have you read Compton Mackenzie’s last?” he asked.
Why would every one persist in talking to her about books? And why did he not say, “the last Compton Mackenzie?” She decided that his diction had been influenced by frequenting his mother’s Women’s Institute and hearing continually of “little Ernest, Mrs. Brown’s second,” or “Mrs. Kett’s last.”
“I’ll lend it to you—I’m not sure if it’s as good as the others, though ... it’s funny, but I’m very fastidious about novels; the only thing I really care about is style—I’m a regular sensualist about fine English.”
“Are you? Perhaps you will like this, then—‘I remember Father Benson saying with his fascinating little stutter: He has such a g-g-gorgeously multitudinous mind’?”
Eben stared at her, quite at a loss as to what she was talking about.
“It sounds ... it sounds topping. What is it from?”
But it wasn’t fair, she decided. Because she happened to date from the feeling of flatness and disgust aroused in her by this sentence, read in a magazine years ago, the awakening in her of the power of distinguishing between literature and journalism, it did not follow that it was exceptionally frightful or that other people ought to react to it in the same way that she had. And yet, “gorgeous palaces,” “multitudinous, seas incarnadine”—the words themselves were beautiful enough in all conscience. Anyhow, it was not Eben’s fault; though “a regular sensualist for fine English....” Good God!
“Do you want _Hee—hee—Heeweeine Melodies_, or _Way Down in Georgia_, or _Abide With Me_? Arnold! Do you want _Hee-wee-ween Melodies_, or _Way Down in Georgia_, or _Abide With Me_? Do say!” yelled Anna from the gramophone.
“People are inclined to think that sailors don’t go in for reading, and that sort of thing, but as a matter of fact ... our Commander, for instance, has a topping library, and all really good books—history mostly.”
Rows upon rows of those volumes, the paper of which is so good, the margins so wide, but out of which, if opened, one of the illustrations is certain to fall—Lady Hamilton, or Ninon de l’Enclos, or Madame Récamier; now Teresa knew who read these books.