"Indeed!" cried Mrs. Pasmer, not wholly pleased, but gratified that she
was able to hide her displeasure. "You make me very curious."

"Oh, I doubt if you'll see more than a mere likeness of temperament,"
Mrs. Brinkley interfered bluntly. "All the conditions are so different.
There couldn't be an American Lisa. That's the charm of these Russian
tragedies. You feel that they're so perfectly true there, and so
perfectly impossible here. Lavretsky would simply have got himself
divorced from Varvara Pavlovna, and no clergyman could have objected to
marrying him to Lisa."

"That's what I mean by his pessimism," said Miss Cotton. "He leaves you
no hope. And I think that despair should never be used in a novel except
for some good purpose; don't you, Mrs. Brinkley?"

"Well," said Mrs. Brinkley, "I was trying to think what good purpose
despair could be put to, in a book or out of it."

"I don't think," said Mrs. Pasmer, referring to the book in her lap,
"that he leaves you altogether in despair here, unless you'd rather he'd
run off with Irene than married Tatiana."

"Oh, I certainly didn't wish that;" said Miss Cotton, in self-defence, as
if the shot had been aimed at her.

"The book ends with a marriage; there's no denying that," said Mrs.
Brinkley, with a reserve in her tone which caused Mrs. Pasmer to continue
for her--