The foundation of her knowledge was
really laid in the idleness of her grandmother's house, where, as most
of the other inmates were not reading people, she had uncontrolled use
of a library full of books with frontispieces, which she used to climb
upon a chair to take down. When she had found one to her taste- she
was guided in the selection chiefly by the frontispiece- she carried
it into a mysterious apartment which lay beyond the library and
which was called, traditionally, no one knew why, the office. Whose
office it had been and at what period it had flourished, she never
learned; it was enough for her that it contained an echo and a
pleasant musty smell and that it was a chamber of disgrace for old
pieces of furniture whose infirmities were not always apparent (so
that the disgrace seemed unmerited and rendered them victims of
injustice) and with which, in the manner of children, she had
established relations almost human, certainly dramatic. There was an
old haircloth sofa in especial, to which she had confided a hundred
childish sorrows. The place owed much of its mysterious melancholy
to the fact that it was properly entered from the second door of the
house, the door that had been condemned, and that it was secured by
bolts which a particularly slender little girl found it impossible
to slide.
Pages:
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46