“D’you want to talk, Dick, or shall I read aloud?”

Clarissa had fetched a book with the rugs.

“Persuasion,” announced Richard, examining the volume.

“That’s for Miss Vinrace,” said Clarissa.  “She can’t bear our beloved Jane.”

“That—­if I may say so—­is because you have not read her,” said Richard.  “She is incomparably the greatest female writer we possess.”

“She is the greatest,” he continued, “and for this reason:  she does not attempt to write like a man.  Every other woman does; on that account, I don’t read ’em.”

“Produce your instances, Miss Vinrace,” he went on, joining his finger-tips.  “I’m ready to be converted.”

He waited, while Rachel vainly tried to vindicate her sex from the slight he put upon it.

“I’m afraid he’s right,” said Clarissa.  “He generally is—­the wretch!”

“I brought Persuasion,” she went on, “because I thought it was a little less threadbare than the others—­though, Dick, it’s no good your pretending to know Jane by heart, considering that she always sends you to sleep!”

“After the labours of legislation, I deserve sleep,” said Richard.

“You’re not to think about those guns,” said Clarissa, seeing that his eye, passing over the waves, still sought the land meditatively, “or about navies, or empires, or anything.”  So saying she opened the book and began to read: 

“’Sir Walter Elliott, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage’—­don’t you know Sir Walter?—­’There he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one.’  She does write well, doesn’t she?  ‘There—­’” She read on in a light humorous voice.  She was determined that Sir Walter should take her husband’s mind off the guns of Britain, and divert him in an exquisite, quaint, sprightly, and slightly ridiculous world.  After a time it appeared that the sun was sinking in that world, and the points becoming softer.  Rachel looked up to see what caused the change.  Richard’s eyelids were closing and opening; opening and closing.  A loud nasal breath announced that he no longer considered appearances, that he was sound asleep.

“Triumph!” Clarissa whispered at the end of a sentence.  Suddenly she raised her hand in protest.  A sailor hesitated; she gave the book to Rachel, and stepped lightly to take the message—­“Mr. Grice wished to know if it was convenient,” etc.  She followed him.  Ridley, who had prowled unheeded, started forward, stopped, and, with a gesture of disgust, strode off to his study.  The sleeping politician was left in Rachel’s charge.  She read a sentence, and took a look at him.  In sleep he looked like a coat hanging at the end of a bed; there were all the wrinkles, and the sleeves and trousers kept their shape though no longer filled out by legs and arms.  You can then best judge the age and state of the coat.  She looked him all over until it seemed to her that he must protest.