. 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. While the
Civil War went on she was still a very young girl; but she passed months
of this long period in a state of almost passionate excitement, in which
she felt herself at times (to her extreme confusion) stirred
almost indiscriminately by the valour of either army. Of course the
circumspection of suspicious swains had never gone the length of making
her a social proscript; for the number of those whose hearts, as they
approached her, beat only just fast enough to remind them they had heads
as well, had kept her unacquainted with the supreme disciplines of
her sex and age. She had had everything a girl could have: kindness,
admiration, bonbons, bouquets, the sense of exclusion from none of the
privileges of the world she lived in, abundant opportunity for dancing,
plenty of new dresses, the London Spectator, the latest publications,
the music of Gounod, the poetry of Browning, the prose of George Eliot.

These things now, as memory played over them, resolved themselves into a
multitude of scenes and figures. Forgotten things came back to her; many
others, which she had lately thought of great moment, dropped out of
sight. The result was kaleidoscopic, but the movement of the instrument
wa