As I was standing between the two rooms, it was easy for me to look into the one devoted to books: I saw a woman of some twenty years, with a bright, wide-awake face. Her dress indicated that she lived near by; her head was uncovered; a black silk apron _à corsage_ fitted her snugly; but her feet were in list slippers which were much too large for her, and she also had a thimble on one of her hands, which were covered with old gloves of which the fingers were cut off. She tripped in, smiling, and placed a package of books on the desk, saying: “Here! we have _devoured_ all these already!” “What! why, you only got them yesterday!” “Oh! we read fast at our house; my aunt doesn’t do anything else, and my sister has a sore thumb and couldn’t work; she often has a sore thumb, my sister has; and my brother much prefers reading novels to practising on the violin. I confess that I like it much better too, when he is not practising; it’s so tiresome to have a violin forever scraping in your ears; oh! it sets my teeth on edge just to think of it. I have a horror of a violin--What are you going to give me? We want something nice.” “I don’t just know, you read so fast; before long you will have read all the books I have got.” “We want something new.” “New! that’s what all the subscribers say; they think that nothing is good except what is new; and yet we have some old novels which are far ahead of the modern ones.” “Bah! you say that to get me to take your _Cleveland_, your _Tom Jones_ and your old _Doyen de Killerine_ again.” “The _Doyen de Killerine_ is a very good book, mademoiselle, and----” “Madame, I don’t take any interest in a hunchback hero with crooked legs and patches over his eyes. No! no! what I like is a handsome young man, very dark and well-built, with a noble carriage; he is all right,--you can imagine him and fancy that you are looking at him. When he makes love, you say to yourself: ‘I’d like to have a lover like him;’ and there’s some pleasure in that.” The proprietress smiled; I did the same, while pretending to be engrossed in my paper. The young woman fluttered from one table to another; she would take up a book, open it, then put it back on its shelf, saying: “We have read this; we have read this. Bless my soul! have we read everything?” “Here, mademoiselle,” said the woman who kept the room, “here’s something interesting and well written.” “What is it?” “_La Femme de Bon Sens, ou La Prisonnière de Bohême._” “Let’s see whom it is by: translated from the English by Ducos. Why, this was published in 1798! Are you making fun of me, to give me such an old novel as this?” “What difference does it make how old it is, when I tell you that it is good?” “I tell you that its age makes a great deal of difference; we like pictures of contemporary manners. A novel more than twenty years old cannot depict the manners of to-day.”