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A Chance Acquaintance by William Dean Howells
page 43 of 203 (21%)
of social difference in others, or imagine itself misprized for anything
but a fault. For such a false conception of her relations to polite
society, Kitty's Uncle Jack was chiefly to blame. In the fierce
democracy of his revolt from his Virginian traditions he had taught his
family that a belief in any save intellectual and moral distinctions was
a mean and cruel superstition; he had contrived to fix this idea so
deeply in the education of his children, that it gave a coloring to
their lives, and Kitty, when her turn came, had the effect of it in the
character of those about her. In fact she accepted his extreme theories
of equality to a degree that delighted her uncle, who, having held them
many years, was growing perhaps a little languid in their tenure and was
glad to have his grasp strengthened by her faith. Socially as well as
politically Eriecreek was almost a perfect democracy, and there was
little in Kitty's circumstances to contradict the doctor's teachings.
The brief visits which she had made to Buffalo and Erie, and, since the
colonel's marriage, to Milwaukee, had not sufficed to undeceive her; she
had never suffered slight save from the ignorant and uncouth; she
innocently expected that in people of culture she should always find
community of feeling and ideas; and she had met Mr. Arbuton all the more
trustfully because as a Bostonian he must be cultivated.

In the secluded life which she led perforce at Eriecreek there was an
abundance of leisure, which she bestowed upon books at an age when most
girls are sent to school. The doctor had a good taste of an
old-fashioned kind in literature, and he had a library pretty well
stocked with the elderly English authors, poets and essayists and
novelists, and here and there an historian, and these Kitty read
childlike, liking them at the time in a certain way, and storing up in
her mind things that she did not understand for the present, but whose
beauty and value dawned upon her from time to time, as she grew older.
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