She was one of the people who say: “I don’t know anything about music really, but I know what I like.”

Beerbohm’s line is a compact satire on a familiar posture of cultivated modesty: the speaker disclaims expertise (“I don’t know anything about music really”) while asserting an unassailable authority of taste (“but I know what I like”). The humor lies in the way the disclaimer functions less as humility than as a conversational shield—closing off criticism and bypassing the need to justify preferences. In Beerbohm’s social comedy, such remarks also hint at class and salon culture, where opinions are performed as markers of identity. The quote skewers the tension between aesthetic judgment as informed understanding and as mere personal appetite, suggesting that the latter can masquerade as the former.