read promiscuously, wading gloriously through trash and
classic and historical and hysterical alike, and finding
something of interest in them all.

She read the sprightly "Duchess" novels, where mad offers of
marriage were always made in flower-scented conservatories;
she read Dickens, and Thelma, and old bound Cosmopolitans,
and Zola, and de Maupassant, and the "Wide, Wide World," and
"Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates," and "Jane Eyre." All
of which are merely mentioned as examples of her
catholicism in literature. As she read she was unaware
of the giggling boys and girls who came in noisily, and made
dates, and were coldly frowned on by the austere Miss
Perkins, the librarian. She would read until the fading
light would remind her that the short fall or winter day was
drawing to a close.

She would come, shivering a little after the fetid
atmosphere of the overheated library, into the crisp, cold
snap of the astringent Wisconsin air. Sometimes she would
stop at the store for her mother. Sometimes she would run
home alone through the twilight, her heels scrunching the
snow, her whole being filled with a vague and unchildish
sadness and disquiet as she faced the tender rose, and
orange, and mauve, and pale lemon of the winter sunset.
There were times when her very heart ached with the beauty
of that color-flooded sky; there were times, later, when it
ached in much the same way at the look in the eyes of a
pushcart peddler; there were times when it ached, seemingly,
for no reason at all--as is sometimes the case when one is a