"What a dear little room!" she said, looking round. "Oh, _Cowper's
Letters_! I've never read them. Are they nice?"
"Rather dull," said Rachel.
"He wrote awfully well, didn't he?" said Clarissa; "--if one likes
that kind of thing--finished his sentences and all that. _Wuthering_
_Heights_! Ah--that's more in my line. I really couldn't exist without
the Brontes! Don't you love them? Still, on the whole, I'd rather live
without them than without Jane Austen."
Lightly and at random though she spoke, her manner conveyed an
extraordinary degree of sympathy and desire to befriend.
"Jane Austen? I don't like Jane Austen," said Rachel.
"You monster!" Clarissa exclaimed. "I can only just forgive you. Tell me
why?"
"She's so--so--well, so like a tight plait," Rachel floundered. "Ah--I
see what you mean. But I don't agree. And you won't when you're older.
At your age I only liked Shelley. I can remember sobbing over him in the
garden.
He has outsoared the shadow of our night,
Envy and calumny and hate and pain-- you remember?
Can touch him not and torture not again
From the contagion of the world's slow stain.
How divine!--and yet what nonsense!" She looked lightly round the room.
"I always think it's _living_, not dying, that counts. I really respect
some snuffy old stockbroker who's gone on adding up column after column
all his days, and trotting back to his villa at Brixton with some old
pug dog he worships, and a dreary little wife sitting at the end of the
table, and going off to Margate for a fortnight--I assure you I know
heaps like that--well, they seem to me _really_ nobler than poets whom
every one worships, just because they're geniuses and die young.
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