“All I got out of him was ‘Don’t be a fool, my dear—how can one repeat the details of a conversation? She’s a highly intelligent woman and she can listen as well as she can talk.’ And then what do you think he said? That he’d placed her wrongly—her knowledge of literature wasn’t at all superficial; she’s very widely read. ‘It just shows,’ he told me, ‘that one shouldn’t generalize about nations on the strength of a brief acquaintance’—and you’d have thought from his tone that I’d been doing the generalizing.”
