"To be sure, I do--and" ... how well you perform that duty, she was prompted to say, but she did not. She hesitated a little, and then added--"And, perhaps, you think I do not do that so much as I ought to do." "Precisely. You will not be angry. No, you can not be angry. You never are. The most trying and provoking things, I observe, can not ruffle you. So I will venture to say, that I think you don't play fair by me. We are both here chiefly to make ourselves agreeable, I believe; and I sometimes wish I had a little more assistance in that duty from one who, I am sure, could perform it admirably, if she so pleased." Lettice shook her head. Then she said, with her usual simplicity, "I used to talk more before you came." "Did you? But that's not quite generous, is it, to throw the whole burden upon me now I _am_ come, instead of sharing it? Why will you not talk now?" "Simply, because I can't. Oh, Mr. St. Leger! the talk is so different since you came here, and I feel my own incapacity so sadly--my own ignorance so forcibly--I should say so painfully; but that, indeed, is not my own fault, and that takes the worst pain, you know, out of things." "Ignorant!" he said: "of what?" "Of all these things you talk about. I used to pick up a little from the newspapers, but now I have done reading them I seem literally to know nothing." "Nothing! Nothing about books, I suppose you mean; for you seem to me to understand men and things better than most people I have met with." "I have experienced more, perhaps, than most girls of my age have done, through my poverty and misfortunes; but what is that?" "Ah, Miss Arnold! what is it but the best part of all knowledge; to understand one's self and others; the best of all possessions; to possess one's own spirit. But I beg your pardon, I will only add, that I do not, by what I say, intend at all to undervalue the advantages of reading, or the happiness of having a love of reading. Do you love reading?" "Why, I don't quite know. I find the books I read aloud to Mrs. Melwyn often very tiresome, I must confess." "And what sort of books do you read to Mrs. Melwyn?" "Why, only two sorts--novels and essays." He laughed a little, in his quiet way, and then said, "I wonder at any young lady disliking novels; I thought it was the very reading they liked best; but as for essays, with very few exceptions, I must own I share in your distaste for them." "I can't understand them very often. I am ashamed to say it; but the writers use such fine language and such strange new words, and then they go over and over again upon the same thought, and illustrate it twenty different ways, when one happy illustration, I think, would be so much better; I like a writer who marches promptly through a subject; those essayists seem as if they never could have done."