"When I read Thackeray and George Eliot, how can I help minding them?"

"Ah well, Thackeray, and George Eliot," said the young nobleman;
"I haven't read much of them."

"Don't you suppose they know about society?" asked Bessie Alden.

"Oh, I daresay they know; they were so very clever.
But these fashionable novels," said Lord Lambeth, "they are
awful rot, you know."

His companion looked at him a moment with her dark blue eyes, and then
she looked down in the chasm where the water was tumbling about.
"Do you mean Mrs. Gore, for instance?" she said presently,
raising her eyes.

"I am afraid I haven't read that, either," was the young
man's rejoinder, laughing a little and blushing.
"I am afraid you'll think I am not very intellectual."

"Reading Mrs. Gore is no proof of intellect. But I like
reading everything about English life--even poor books.
I am so curious about it."

"Aren't ladies always curious?" asked the young man jestingly.

But Bessie Alden appeared to desire to answer his question seriously.
"I don't think so--I don't think we are enough so--that we care
about many things. So it's all the more of a compliment," she added,
"that I should want to know so much about England."