Then, observing that Monica ate only a few morsels, he took offence at this.
'I'm afraid you are not well, dear.

You have had no appetite for several days.' 'As much as usual, I think,' she replied absently.
They went into the library, commonly their resort of an evening.
Widdowson possessed several hundred volumes of English literature, most of them the works which are supposed to be indispensible to a well-informed man, though very few men even make a pretence of reading them.

Self-educated, Widdowson deemed it his duty to make acquaintance with the great, the solid authors.

Nor was his study of them affectation.

For the poets he had little taste; the novelists he considered only profitable in intervals of graver reading; but history, political economy, even metaphysics, genuinely appealed to him.