“Would it be rude if I suggested that the reason for that is that the worst side of people is so much more to the front than their best?” asked Colin. “We all put our worst foot foremost.... And then think of Dennis, Vi. Would you like him to have among the early recollections of his boyhood the memory of his grandfather telling bawdy stories and reeling up to bed after dinner in a squall of hiccups? And then, last and least, there’s myself. Your father bores and disgusts me. I hinted to him that he was not perhaps such a fixture here as he seemed to imagine, and now, please, you’re going to repeat that timid conviction, so that he may see that on this, as on every point, we’re at one. Mind, the suggestion has got to come from yourself not from me: otherwise he will think that I have asked you to make it. Now we’ve spent too much time and speech already over a trivial matter. You think I’m a brute, but then you often do that. I’m used to that: getting almost callous about it.” He held up the sheaf of typed pages which had occupied him all the morning. “I’ve had a delicious day,” he said, “for I’ve been reading the Memoirs of old Colin. I had them type-written, and they’re entrancing. He realized himself so wonderfully. There was neither false shame nor conceit about him. He was neither proud nor the reverse of being such a devil. I thought of letting some learned Antiquarian Society publish them. Odd, isn’t it, how all the puritanical, pure-minded people, chiefly women, who shiver and are shocked at what they call a bad man, and won’t visit him or have him to dinner, and heave any sort of brick at him, greedily devour any indecent memoir, and simply roll in it, like dogs when they’ve found some putrescent muck.... You’d have thought that, if they shudder at wickedness, they wouldn’t care to read about it. But they say it’s the historical interest that makes them devour it, which isn’t true. It’s the insatiable fascination that wickedness has for prudes. However, the Memoirs are enchanting: they ring so absolutely true: you feel you are looking at the very man himself. I even found myself believing in the literal truth of the legend. Sit down and dip into them, darling; you won’t find a dull page anywhere. Meantime I’m puzzling out a curious plan of some projected addition to the house, which he never executed.” “I won’t read them to-night,” she said. “It is rather late.” “Very good. I won’t insist on that as you’ve been a good girl otherwise. But you must read them some day. I want to know if a certain thing strikes you as it struck me.” “What is that?” she asked.