arm-chair, so that Clarissa was invited to sit there.

"What a dear little room!" she said, looking round. "Oh, _Cowper's
Letters_! I've never read them. Are they nice?"

"Rather dull," said Rachel.

"He wrote awfully well, didn't he?" said Clarissa; "--if one likes
that kind of thing--finished his sentences and all that. _Wuthering_
_Heights_! Ah--that's more in my line. I really couldn't exist without
the Brontes! Don't you love them? Still, on the whole, I'd rather live
without them than without Jane Austen."

Lightly and at random though she spoke, her manner conveyed an
extraordinary degree of sympathy and desire to befriend.

"Jane Austen? I don't like Jane Austen," said Rachel.

"You monster!" Clarissa exclaimed. "I can only just forgive you. Tell me
why?"

"She's so--so--well, so like a tight plait," Rachel floundered. "Ah--I
see what you mean. But I don't agree. And you won't when you're older.
At your age I only liked Shelley. I can remember sobbing over him in the
garden.

He has outsoared the shadow of our night,
Envy and calumny and hate and pain-- you remember?

Can touch him not and torture not again