She had had a dull morning. Helena had brought her a novel from
Loring's that she could not read. Novels, any more than life, cannot
be read with very much patience, unless they touch something besides
surface. Why do critics--some of them--make such short, smart
work,--such cheerful, confident despatch, nowadays, of a story with
religion in it, as if it were an abnormity,--a thing with sentence
of death in itself, like a calf born with two heads,--that needs not
their trouble, save to name it as it is? Why, that is, if religion
stand for the relation of things to spirit, which I suppose it
should? Somebody said that somebody had written a book made up of
"spiritual struggles and strawberry short-cake." That was bright and
funny; and it seemed to settle the matter; but, taking strawberry
short-cake representatively, what else is human experience on earth
made up of? And are novels to be pictures of human experience, or
not?

This has nothing to do with present matters, however, except that
Desire found nothing real in her novel, and so had flung it aside,
and was sitting rather listlessly with her crochet which she never
cared much for, when Uncle Oldways entered.

Her face brightened instantly as he came in. He sat down just where
he had sat the other night. Mr. Oldways had a fashion of finding the
same seat a second time when he had come in once; he was a man who
took up most things where he left them off, and this was an
unconscious sign of it.

"Your mother has decided to sell the house on the 23d, it seems," he
said.