She would stay at home with the infant while the intermediate generation
was away larking. She was always reading the same book. It was a thick
book, with a glossy coloured cover displaying some scene in which homicide
and passion were mingled; its price, new, was sixpence halfpenny, and its
title was simply and magnificently, "Borgia!" with a note of exclamation
after it. She confined herself to "Borgia!" She was tireless with
"Borgia!" She went home to Paris reading "Borgia!" It was a shocking
hotel, so different from the literary hotels of Switzerland, Bournemouth,
and Scarborough, where all the guests read Meredith and Walter Pater. I
ought to have been ashamed to be seen in such a place. My only excuse is
that the other two hotels in the remote little village were just as bad,
probably worse.
THE BRITISH ACADEMY OF LETTERS
[Sidenote:_18 Aug. '10_]
A correspondent writes angrily to me because I have not written angrily
about the list of authors recently put forward as Academicians of the
proposed new British Academy of Letters. The fact is that the entire
scheme of the British Academy of Letters had a near shave of escaping my
attention altogether. I only heard of it by accident, being away on a
holiday in a land where they have had enough of academies.
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