Anthony Trollope: Barchester Towers

27. CHAPTER XXVII: A LOVE SCENE (continued)

Oh, that such grace and such beauty should have condescended to waste itself on such a pursuit!

'I was in the act of writing to you,' said she, 'but now my scrawl may go into the basket;' and she raised the sheet of gilded note paper from off her desk as though to tear it.

'Indeed it shall not,' said he, laying the embargo of half a stone weight of human flesh and blood upon the devoted paper. 'Nothing that you write for my eyes, signora, shall be so desecrated,' and he took up the letter, put that also among the carrots and fed on it, and then proceeded to read it.

'Gracious me! Mr Slope,' said she. 'I hope you don't mean to say that you keep all the trash I write to you. Half my time I don't know what I write, and when I do, I know it is only fit for the black of the fire. I hope you have not that ugly trick of keeping letters.'

'At any rate I don't throw them into a waste-paper basket. If destruction is their doomed lot, they perish worthily, and are burnt on a pyre, as Dido was of old.'

'With a steel pen stuck through them, of course,' said she, 'to make the simile more complete. Of all the ladies of my acquaintance I think Lady Dido was the most absurd. Why did she not do as Cleopatra did? Why did she not take out her ships and insist on going with him? She could not bear to lose the land she had got by a swindle; and then she could not bear the loss of her lover. So she fell between two stools. Mr Slope, whatever you do, never mingle love and business.'