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Updated: June 13, 2025
Had he been thy neighbour, thou well-to-do reader, with a house in the country, would he not have been welcome to thy table? Wouldst thou have avoided him at his club, thou reader from the West-end? Has he not settled himself respectably, thou grey-haired, novel-reading paterfamilias, thou materfamilias, with daughters of thine own to be married?
But I was surprised to see a man so keen and sarcastic, so much of a scoffer, pouring himself out with such simplicity and tenderness in all sorts of affectionate nonsense. Through our whole journey to Perth he kept up a sort of mock quarrel with his daughter; attacked her about novel-reading, laughed her into a pet, kissed her out of it, and laughed her into it again.
I realised a little while ago that I was getting sadly belated in the matter of novel-reading. I had come to decline on a few old favourites and was breaking no new ground. That is a provincial frame of mind, just as when a man begins to discard dressing for dinner, and can endure nothing but an old coat and slippers.
I had to make my own way. You know the monstrous education at a boarding-school, foolish novel-reading, the errors of early youth, the first timid flutter of love. It was awful! The vacillation! And the agonies of losing faith in life, in oneself! Ah, you are an author. You know us women. You will understand. Unhappily I have an intense nature. I looked for happiness and what happiness!
Mary is running with company you do not approve of, to balls, theaters, and other demoralizing places; wanting finery you are not able to afford, although you do your best. You can't get any help from her; for, when not otherwise engaged, she is absorbed in novel-reading. It does no good to complain to her father; in fact, that seems only to make a bad matter worse.
I don't believe they are good for me." This was in reference to all Miss Eunice's talk about the evils of novel-reading as repeated by Katie. A sudden thought struck the latter. "Tessa," she said, "it must be awfully lonely at your boarding-house in the evenings and on Sundays. I wish you could come and live with me. I have no companions but the boys, and to have you would be just splendid."
The intervening years have been spent in practicing music, fancy work, novel-reading and party-going, no thought having been given, to the grave responsibilities of maternity, and scarcely any of that solid intellectual culture obtained which would fit her for such responsibilities; and now see her with an unfolding human character committed to her charge, see her profoundly ignorant of the phenomena with which she has to deal, undertaking to do that which can be done but imperfectly even with the aid of the profoundest knowledge!"
To which Philomela invariably retorted: "But suppose every strapping fellow, at your time of life, should take to novel-reading, and such fooleries, what would become of the world, I would like to know?"
Some of the lagging days were spent not only in novel-reading, as the Emperor in after years confessed to Mme. de Rémusat, but in attempts at novel-writing, to relieve the tedium of idle hours. It is said that first and last Buonaparte read "Werther" five times through. Enough remains among his boyish scribblings to show how fantastic were the dreams both of love and of glory in which he indulged.
"He was a cantankerous old brute," said the Duke of Stone with candor, "but he chanced to be an omnivorous novel-reader. Nothing was too sentimental for him in his later years." "I took the thing out and read it," Tembarom went on, uneasily, the emotion of his first novel-reading stirring him as he talked. "It kept me up half the night, and I hadn't finished it then. I wanted to know the end."
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