eally stated his own motive in reading. He compromised.
"Well, I like the author to do my thinking for me."

"Yes," said the other, "that is what I mean."

"The question is whether 'The Maiden Knight' fellow does it," said
Kenby, taking duck and pease from the steward at his shoulder.

"What my wife likes in it is to see what one woman can do and be
single-handed," said March.

"No," his wife corrected him, "what a man thinks she can."

"I suppose," said Mr. Triscoe, unexpectedly, "that we're like the
English in our habit of going off about a book like a train of powder."

"If you'll say a row of bricks," March assented, "I'll agree with you.
It's certainly Anglo-Saxon to fall over one another as we do, when we
get going. It would be interesting to know just how much liking there is
in the popularity of a given book."

"It's like the run of a song, isn't it?" Kenby suggested. "You can't
stand either, when it reaches a given point."

He spoke to March and ignored Triscoe, who had hitherto ignored the rest
of the table.

"It's very curious," March said. "The book or the song catches a mood,
or feeds a craving, and when one passes or the other is glutted--"

"The discouraging part is," Triscoe put in, still limiting himself to
the Marches, "that it's never a question of real taste. The things that
go down with us are so crude, so coarsely spiced; they tickle such a
vulgar palate--Now in France, for instance," he suggested.

"Well, I don't know," returned the editor. "After all, we eat a good
deal of bread, and we drink more pure water than any other people. Even
when we drink it iced, I fancy it isn't so bad as absinthe."

The young bride looked at him gratefully, but she said, "If we can't
get ice-water in Europe, I don't know what Mr. Leffers will do," and the
talk threatened to pass among the ladies into a comparison of American
and European customs.

Burnamy could not bear to let it. "I don't pretend to be very well up
in French literature," he began, "but I think such a book as 'The Maiden
Knight' isn't such a bad piece of work; people are liking a pretty
well-built story when they like it. Of course it's sentimental, and
it begs the question a good deal; but it imagines something heroic in
character, and it makes the reader imagine it too. The man who wrote
that book may be a donkey half the time, but he's a genius the other
half. By-and-by he'll do something--after he's come to see that his
'Maiden Kn