She saw
the young men who came in large numbers to see her sister; but as a
general thing they were afraid of her; they had a belief that some
special preparation was required for talking with her. Her
reputation of reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy
envelope of a goddess in an epic; it was supposed to engender
difficult questions and to keep the conversation at a low temperature.
The poor girl liked to be thought clever, but she hated to be
thought bookish; she used to read in secret and, though her memory was
excellent, to abstain from showy reference. She had a great desire for
knowledge, but she really preferred almost any source of information
to the printed page; she had an immense curiosity about life and was
constantly staring and wondering. She carried within herself a great
fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity
between the movements of her own soul and the agitations of the world.
For this reason she was fond of seeing great crowds and large
stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of
looking at historical pictures- a class of efforts as to which she had
often committed the conscious solecism of forgiving them much bad
painting for the sake of the subject.
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