GEORGE MOORE AND JOHN FREEMAN
BY GEORGE MOORE
Maid: Mr Freeman, sir.
Freeman: I am afraid I am interrupting.
Moore: You are welcome to interrupt my reading. I am always willing to lay aside a book to talk.
Freeman: To anybody?
Moore: I prefer a man of wit like yourself; but since I am confessing myself I will disclose all. I would lay aside the wisest book to talk to a stupid woman.
Freeman: Or man?
Moore: Yes; or man, for I have lost my taste for reading, and there are few greater misfortunes. We cannot always be talking, we cannot always be at the theatre, we cannot always be listening to music or visiting exhibitions of pictures; and to lose one's taste for reading is really like losing one's taste for bread.
Freeman: But I find you reading.
Moore: Reading with a purpose, which is a very different thing from reading for pleasure. I am reading one of George Eliot's novels.
Freeman: Reading George Eliot, and for a purpose? I shouldn't have been surprised if I had found you reading Jane Austen or the Brontés, but Daniel Deronda!
Moore: The story I am reading is less purposeful—Silas Marner. Ah, if she had been less purposeful!
Freeman: Yet in spite of her purposes, which are fatiguing, you find something to admire?
Moore: The book has only just come from the library. I am in the first pages and am surprised to find that she has a better conception of what a story should be than most English writers. I remember her first book, Scenes from Clerical Life, and one story has haunted me ever since.
Freeman: You do not intend to write something like it?
Moore: My dear Mr Freeman!
