The girl went off at a tangent. "Don't you just _love_ Mr. Gillette in 'Sherlock Holmes'? There's a play I should think you would like to read! They say there's a novel been made out of it. I wish I could get hold of it for you. Well, go on, grandfather!" "No, my dear, it's for you to go on. But don't you think you've catechised me sufficiently about my reading? You must find it very old-fashioned." "No, not at all. I like old things myself. The girls are always laughing at me because I read George Eliot, and Dickens, and Thackeray, and Charles Reade, and Wilkie Collins, and those back numbers. But I should say, if I said anything, that you were rather deficient in fiction, grandfather. You seem to have read everything but novels." "Is that so? I was afraid I had read nothing but novels. I----" "Tell me what novels you have read," she broke in upon him imperatively. "The ones you consider the greatest." The grandfather had to think. "It is rather a long list--so long that I'm ashamed of it. Perhaps I'd better mention only the very greatest, like _Don Quixote_, and _Gil Blas_, and _Wilhelm Meister_, and _The Vicar of Wakefield_, and _Clarissa Harlowe_, and _Emma_, and _Pride and Prejudice_, and _The Bride of Lammermoor_, and _I Promessi Sposi_, and _Belinda_, and _Frankenstein_, and _Chartreuse de Parme_, and _Cesar Birotteau_, and _The Last Days of Pompeii_, and _David Copperfield_, and _Pendennis_, and _The Scarlet Letter_, and _Blithedale Romance_, and _The Cloister and the Hearth_, and _Middlemarch_, and _Smoke_, and _Fathers and Sons_, and _A Nest of Nobles_, and _War and Peace_, and _Anna Karenina_, and _Resurrection_, and _Dona Perfecta_, and _Marta y Maria_, and _I Malavoglia_, and _The Return of the Native_, and _L'Assomoir_, and _Madame Bovary_, and _The Awkward Age_, and _The Grandissimes_--and most of the other books of the same authors. Of course, I've read many more perhaps as great as these, that I can't think of at the moment." The young girl listened, in a vain effort to follow her agile ancestor in and out of the labyrinths of his favorite fiction, most of which she did not recognize by the names he gave and some of which she believed to be very shocking, in a vague association of it with deeply moralized, denunciatory criticisms which she had read of the books or the authors. Upon the whole, she was rather pained by the confession which his reading formed for her grandfather, and she felt more than ever the necessity of undertaking his education, or at least his reform, in respect to it. She was glad now that she had decided to give him books for a Christmas present, for there was no time like Christmas for good resolutions, and if her grandfather was ever going to turn over a new leaf, this was the very hour to help him do it.