At most, he permitted himself from time to time to look at her through his winking eye and smile significantly. Miss Thriplow on these occasions pretended not to notice. In the circumstances, it was the best thing she could do. “People always seem to imagine,” said Miss Thriplow with a martyr’s sigh, “that being educated means being sophisticated. And what’s more, they never seem to be able to give one credit for having a good heart as well as a good head.” And she had _such_ a good heart. Any one can be clever, she used to say. But what matters is being kind and good, and having nice feelings. She felt more than ever pleased about that bay-leaf incident. That was having nice feelings. “They always seem entirely to misunderstand what one writes,” Miss Thriplow went on. “They like my books because they’re smart and unexpected and rather paradoxical and cynical and elegantly brutal. They don’t see how serious it all is. They don’t see the tragedy and the tenderness underneath. You see,” she explained, “I’m trying to do something new—a chemical compound of all the categories. Lightness and tragedy and loveliness and wit and fantasy and realism and irony and sentiment all combined. People seem to find it merely amusing, that’s all.” She threw out her hands despairingly. “It’s only to be expected,” said Mr. Cardan comfortingly. “Any one who has anything to say can’t fail to be misunderstood. The public only understands the things with which it is perfectly familiar. Something new makes it lose its orientation. And then think of the misunderstandings between even intelligent people, people who know one another personally. Have you ever corresponded with a distant lover?” Miss Thriplow slightly nodded; she was familiar, professionally, with every painful experience. “Then you must know how easy it is for your correspondent to take the expression of one of your passing moods—forgotten long before the arrival of the letter at its destination—as your permanent spiritual condition. Haven’t you been shocked to receive, by the returning post, a letter rejoicing with you in your gaiety, when in fact, at the moment, you are plunged in gloom; or astonished, when you come whistling down to breakfast, to find beside your plate sixteen pages of sympathy and consolation? And have you ever had the misfortune to be loved by somebody you do not love? Then you know very well how expressions of affection which must have been written with tears in the eyes and from the depth of the heart seem to you not merely silly and irritating, but in the worst possible bad taste. Positively vulgar, like those deplorable letters that are read in the divorce courts. And yet these are precisely the expressions that you habitually use when writing to the person you yourself are in love with. In the same way, the reader of a book who happens to be out of tune with the author’s prevailing mood will be bored to death by the things that were written with the greatest enthusiasm.