She spent some minutes over
the Swifts, but not sufficiently attracted to march off with them. The
quaint, obsolete type of the various volumes attracted her more as a
curiosity than as readable print; the coarse satires of the early
masters of caricature and cartoon did not attract her at all. Rachel's
upbringing had deprived her of the traditions, the superstitions, and
the shibboleths which are at once a strength and a weakness of the
ordinary English education; if, however, she was too much inclined to
take a world's masterpiece exactly as she found it, her taste, such as
it was, at all events was her own.
She had naturally an open mind, but it was not open now; it was full and
running over with the mysteries and the perplexities of her own
environment. Books would not take her out of herself; in them she could
not hope to find a key to any one of the problems within problems which
beset and tortured her. So she ran her hand along the dusty books,
little dreaming that the key was there all the time; so in the end, and
quite by chance, but for the fact that she was dipping into so many, she
took out the right book, and started backward with it in her hand.
Pages:
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177