Читать книгу The Awkward Age онлайн

92 страница из 108

"Come, I say!" Mr. Mitchett protested; "I've seen you with books from Vanderbank which if you HAVE discussed them with him—well," he laughed, "I should like to have been there!"

"You haven't seen me with anything like yours—no, no, never, never!" She was particularly positive. "Van on the contrary gives tremendous warnings, makes apologies, in advance, for things that—well, after all, haven't killed one."

"That have even perhaps a little, after the warnings, let one down?"

She took no notice of this coarse pleasantry, she simply adhered to her thesis. "One has taken one's dose and one isn't such a fool as to be deaf to some fresh true note if it happens to turn up. But for abject horrid unredeemed vileness from beginning to end—"

"So you read to the end?" Mr. Mitchett interposed.

"I read to see what you could possibly have sent such things to me for, and because so long as they were in my hands they were not in the hands of others. Please to remember in future that the children are all over the place and that Harold and Nanda have their nose in everything."