"I always wish that you could marry everybody who wants to marry you.

Perhaps they'll come to that in time, but meanwhile I confess that dear William--" But here Mr.Hilbery came in, and the more solid part of the evening began.

This consisted in the reading aloud by Katharine from some prose work or other, while her mother knitted scarves intermittently on a little circular frame, and her father read the newspaper, not so attentively but that he could comment humorously now and again upon the fortunes of the hero and the heroine.
The Hilberys subscribed to a library, which delivered books on Tuesdays and Fridays, and Katharine did her best to interest her parents in the works of living and highly respectable authors; but Mrs.Hilbery was perturbed by the very look of the light, gold-wreathed volumes, and would make little faces as if she tasted something bitter as the reading went on; while Mr.Hilbery would treat the moderns with a curious elaborate banter such as one might apply to the antics of a promising child.

So this evening, after five pages or so of one of these masters, Mrs.Hilbery protested that it was all too clever and cheap and nasty for words.
"Please, Katharine, read us something REAL." Katharine had to go to the bookcase and choose a portly volume in sleek, yellow calf, which had directly a sedative effect upon both her parents.
But the delivery of the evening post broke in upon the periods of Henry Fielding, and Katharine found that her letters needed all her attention..