9.45 p.m.

I have a new unbreakable rule: never, never to study at night no matter
how many written reviews are coming in the morning. Instead, I read
just plain books--I have to, you know, because there are eighteen
blank years behind me. You wouldn't believe, Daddy, what an abyss
of ignorance my mind is; I am just realizing the depths myself.
The things that most girls with a properly assorted family and a home
and friends and a library know by absorption, I have never heard of.
For example:

I never read Mother Goose or David Copperfield or Ivanhoe or
Cinderella or Blue Beard or Robinson Crusoe or Jane Eyre or Alice
in Wonderland or a word of Rudyard Kipling. I didn't know that Henry
the Eighth was married more than once or that Shelley was a poet.
I didn't know that people used to be monkeys and that the Garden
of Eden was a beautiful myth. I didn't know that R. L. S. stood
for Robert Louis Stevenson or that George Eliot was a lady.
I had never seen a picture of the `Mona Lisa' and (it's true but you
won't believe it) I had never heard of Sherlock Holmes.

Now, I know all of these things and a lot of others besides,
but you can see how much I need to catch up. And oh, but it's fun!
I look forward all day to evening, and then I put an `engaged' on the
door and get into my nice red bath robe and furry slippers and pile
all the cushions behind me on the couch, and light the brass student
lamp at my elbow, and read and read and read one book isn't enough.
I have four going at once. Just now, they're Tennyson's poems and
Vanity Fair and Kipling's Plain Tales and--don't laugh--Little Women.
I find that I am the only girl in college who wasn't brought up on