"
"He is the clever sort, like myself," said Cecil.
Freddy looked at him doubtfully.
"How well did you know them at the Bertolini?" asked Mrs.
Honeychurch.
"Oh, very slightly. I mean, Charlotte knew them even less than I
did."
"Oh, that reminds me--you never told me what Charlotte said in
her letter."
"One thing and another," said Lucy, wondering whether she would
get through the meal without a lie. "Among other things, that an
awful friend of hers had been bicycling through Summer Street,
wondered if she'd come up and see us, and mercifully didn't."
"Lucy, I do call the way you talk unkind."
"She was a novelist," said Lucy craftily. The remark was a happy
one, for nothing roused Mrs. Honeychurch so much as literature in
the hands of females. She would abandon every topic to inveigh
against those women who (instead of minding their houses and
their children) seek notoriety by print. Her attitude was: "If
books must be written, let them be written by men"; and she de-
veloped it at great length, while Cecil yawned and Freddy played
at "This year, next year, now, never," with his plum-stones, and
Lucy artfully fed the flames of her mother's wrath.
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