Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/257

 No: she could see nothing in it: there was no wit now-a-days—only personalities, which grew more gross every year.

The Duc urged that personalities were as old as Cratinus and Archilochus, and that five hundred years before Christ the satires of Hipponax drove Bupalus to hang himself.

She answered that a bad thing was not the better for being old.

People were talking of a clever English novel translated everywhere, called "In a Hothouse," the hothouse being society—had she seen it?

No: what was the use of reading novels of society by people who never had been in it? The last English "society" novel she had read had described a cabinet minister in London as going to a Drawing-room in the crowd, with everybody else, instead of by the petite entrée; they were always full of such blunders.

Had she read the new French story "Le Bal de Mademoiselle Bibi?"

No: she had heard too much of it; it made you almost wish for a Censorship of the Press.

The Duc agreed that literature was terribly