ge, but of themselves,
yes. Their beauty and their greatness were personal to them; even their
dulness might be so; but their foulness was what had come off on them
from living at periods when manners were foul.

XXIII

READING FOR A GRANDFATHER

A young girl (much respected by the Easy Chair) who had always had the
real good of her grandfather at heart, wished to make him a Christmas
present befitting his years and agreeable to his tastes. She thought,
only to dismiss them for their banality, of a box of the finest cigars,
of a soft flannel dressing-gown, a bath robe of Turkish towelling
embroidered by herself, of a velvet jacket, and of a pair of house
shoes. She decided against some of these things because he did not
smoke, because he never took off his walking coat and shoes till he went
to bed, and because he had an old bath robe made him by her grandmother,
very short and very scant (according to her notion at the chance moments
when she had surprised him in it), from which neither love nor money
could part him; the others she rejected for the reason already assigned.
Little or nothing remained, then, but to give him books, and she was
glad that she was forced to this conclusion because, when she reflected,
she realized that his reading seemed to be very much neglected, or at
least without any lift of imagination or any quality of modernity in it.
As far as she had observed, he read the same old things over and over
again, and did not know at all what was now going on in the great world
of literature. She herself was a famous reader, and an authority about
books with other girls, and with the young men who asked her across the
afternoon tea-cups whether she had seen this or that new book, and
scrabbled round, in choosing between cream and lemon, to hide the fact
that they had not seen it themselves. She was therefore exactly the
person to select a little library of the latest reading for an old
gentleman who was so behind the times as her grandfather; but before she
plunged into the mad vortex of new publications she thought she would
delicately find out his preferences, or if he had none, would try to
inspire him with a curiosity concerning these or those new books.

"Now, grandfather," she began, "you know I always give you a Christmas
present."

"Yes, my dear," the old gentleman patiently assented, "I know you do.
You are very thoughtful."

"Not at all. If there is anything I hate, it is being th