Hers was that random, uninformed, but severely discriminating taste which maddens you: you try unsuccessfully to think that there is nothing at the back of it, nothing but a misty criterion of enjoyment. She used some words as though she had never heard any one else using them. “Nice,” for instance, she used in a calmly immense sense. The word seemed turned topsy-turvy, and to turn everything else topsy-turvy. She used the word “common,” I think, to denote a thing attempted and achieved scratchily. Mr. Ernest Bramah was, for instance, not “common.” But Miss Clemence Dane in _Legend_ was. “Oh, come!” I said, for to me _Legend_ is an achievement in literature. “All those women talking and dissecting and yearning together,” she said. “Their breath smells of ... oh, red hair!” She thought Miss Romer Wilson was among the greatest writers of the time: _The Grand Tour_ particularly. She was loyal to girlish admirations for Mr. Locke, Mr. Temple Thurston, Oscar Wilde. D. H. Lawrence was “nice.” “Nice?” I said. “Well, wonderful,” she said, with wide eyes, so that I was made to seem slow and stupid. M. Paul Morand was “common,” a “stunt” writer. “I detest the word ‘stunt,’” I said. “That is why,” she said, “I used it about Monsieur Morand. He is an abbreviation, like nightie for nightshirt.” I did not agree with her. She did not like abbreviations, even lunch for luncheon. “What,” she asked, “is the hurry?” I could not tell her. She thought that perhaps English was not the language for abbreviations and diminutives. She deferred to my judgment about that, and I said what I said. One just didn’t discuss Barrie: there he was. “You can’t laugh me out of him,” she smiled, “by calling him whimsical.” She had once enjoyed a book by Mr. Compton Mackenzie, a garden catalogue called _Guy and Pauline_. There was Hergesheimer. She put up a gallant, insincere defence for the Imagistes, but it turned out that she had never read any, and wasn’t at all sure what they were. “They’re short for poetry,” I said coldly, “like nightie for nightingale.” But perhaps the book she most profoundly liked was _The Passionate Friends_, with perhaps the last part of _Tono-Bungay_. “And, of course,” she said, “_The Good Soldier_,” Mr. Ford Maddox Hueffer’s amazing romance. From a table she picked up Joyce’s _Ulysses_, looked at it vaguely, dropped it absently on the floor amongst the others. I held a watching financial brief for it. One was to find later that she was completely without a sense of property, either her own or other people’s. “It’s a funny thing,” she mused.... “What’s a funny thing?” “Satirists.... They are all very plain men. Grubby, too. Why?” “Why?” I said. “But, really----” She looked at me through the smoke of her cigarette. She was grave, intent. But one never knew what about.... “Genius,” I said, “has----” “Of course, genius. But----” “They are striving,” I said, “for----”