were busy putting the books in place. Laura stood half-way up the
step-ladder taking volume after volume from Landry as he passed them
to her.

"Do you wipe them carefully, Landry?" she asked.

He held a strip of cloth torn from an old sheet in his hand, and
rubbed the dust from each book before he handed it to her.

"Yes, yes; very carefully," he assured her. "Say," he added, "where
are all your modern novels? You've got Scott and Dickens and
Thackeray, of course, and Eliot--yes, and here's Hawthorne and Poe.
But I haven't struck anything later than Oliver Wendell Holmes."

Laura put up her chin. "Modern novels--no indeed. When I've yet to
read 'Jane Eyre,' and have only read 'Ivanhoe' and 'The Newcomes'
once."

She made a point of the fact that her taste was the extreme of
conservatism, refusing to acknowledge hardly any fiction that was
not almost classic. Even Stevenson aroused her suspicions.

"Well, here's 'The Wrecker,'" observed Landry, handing it up to her.
"I read it last summer-vacation at Waukesha. Just about took the top
of my head off."

"I tried to read it," she answered. "Such an outlandish story, no
love story in it, and so coarse, so brutal, and then so improbable.
I couldn't get interested."