Page 46 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

the surface communication was interrupted by a dozen ca-
pricious forces. She saw the young men who came in large
numbers to see her sister; but as a general thing they were
afraid of her; they had a belief that some special preparation
was required for talking with her. Her reputation of reading
a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a
goddess in an epic; it was supposed to engender difficult
questions and to keep the conversation at a low tempera-
ture. The poor girl liked to be thought clever, but she hated
to be thought bookish; she used to read in secret and, though
her memory was excellent, to abstain from showy reference.
She had a great desire for knowledge, but she really pre-
ferred almost any source of information to the printed page;
she had an immense curiosity about life and was constantly
staring and wondering. She carried within herself a great
fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the con-
tinuity between the movements of her own soul and the
agitations of the world. For this reason she was fond of see-
ing great crowds and large stretches of country, of reading
about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pic-
tures—a class of efforts as to which she had often committed
the conscious solecism of forgiving them much bad paint-
ing for the sake of the subject. While the Civil War went on
she was still a very young girl; but she passed months of this
long period in a state of almost passionate excitement, in
which she felt herself at times (to her extreme confusion)
stirred almost indiscriminately by the valour of either army.
Of course the circumspection of suspicious swains had nev-
er gone the length of making her a social proscript; for the

46 The Portrait of a Lady