e same she
may be just as intimately persuaded that it is only a concatenation of
adverse circumstances which has prevented her finishing the book long
ago, as you are that she will never finish it.

However, as already said, there may sometimes be found among non-readers
a clear apprehension of the state of their case. Thus, a lady once
avowed, when a conversation had turned upon the profit and pleasure of
reading, that she had not the least liking for books and never had had.
She regretted it extremely; she felt when she saw any one absorbed in
reading that she had missed something; there were times when if she
could forget herself in a book she should be very glad, but she could
not; she had never been taught to care for reading when she was a child,
and it was too late to learn now. Still, on being persuaded to think
that she might at least try, she expressed an ambition to enjoy
Thackeray, and asked to have his best novel recommended. "Vanity Fair"
was accordingly suggested as most likely to please her, and, it being
procured, she announced on the following evening that she had read
_thirty pages_ that day, and meant to continue at the same rate. Her
admiration, alas! was plainly more for her own achievement than for that
of her author; nevertheless, the literary adviser talked encouragingly,
as the medical adviser often must, in spite of bad signs, and for a few
nights the number of pages kept pretty well up to the mark, then
steadily declined, and, after an hiatus or two, "Vanity Fair" was
mentioned no more. It was, as the lady herself had thought, too late.
But on another point also she may have been right,--namely, in the
implied belief that childhood was the time when she might have learned
to like reading.

There is certainly a wide-spread impression that children ought to
display some taste for literature, so that to say a child does not care
for his book is rather a damaging statement: it is made with reluctance:
one is "_afraid_ Charlie does not like to read;" one always adds, if
possible, that "he likes to be read to, however," and in any case the
obliging by-stander hastens to say, "Oh, well, perhaps he will take to
reading as he grows older," which remark, on the principle that one
never knows what may happen, is incontrovertible as far as it goes. No
one would wish to assert dogmatically that Charlie will not ripen into a
reader, but at the same time no one very seriously supposes that he
will. "As t