Tolstoi and Turgenieff shut up within you?'

"'I can ride,' I said. 'If you don't want me to go mad, leave me in the
evenings to myself. Take my place in the carriage with Aunt Isabel, and let
me ride alone.'

"Fraeulein had lived in bonds herself, and she had the soul of an artist.
She knew what it is, for days together, to have barely an hour to one's own
thoughts; never to step out alone of a summer night, after a long, hot,
feverish day. She let me go with old Manuel, the head groom, as my escort.
He was no more hindrance to solitude than a pine-tree or a post.

"The reading and the music and the heat went on. I was in a fever of
emotion such as I had never known. Fraeulein perceived it. She recommended
'My Religion' as an antidote to the romances. I did not want his religion.
I wanted his men and women, his reading of the human soul, the largeness of
incident, the sense of time and space, the intricacy of family life, the
problems of race, the march of nations across the great world-canvas.

"I rode--not alone, but with the high-strung beings that lived between the
pages of my books: men and women who knew no curb, who stopped at nothing,
and who paid the price of their passionate mistakes. Old Manuel, standing
by the horses, looked strange to me. I spoke to him dramatically, as the
women I read of would have spoken. Nothing could have added to or detracted
from his own manner. He was of the old Spanish stock, but for the first
time I saw his picturesqueness. I liked him to call me 'the Nina,' and
address me in the third person with his eyes upon the ground.

"All this was preparatory. It is part of my defense; but do not forget the
heat, the imprisonment, the sense of relief when the sun went down, the