The Count and I were
free spirits. From the book I had learned that. He got into
political trouble through it, and I had got into mathematical
trouble, and we told our troubles. One instant the room was in
laughter, the next the boys bowed their heads, and the girls who
had forgotten their handkerchiefs cried in their aprons. For
almost sixteen big foolscap pages I held them, and I was eager to
go on and tell them more about it when I reached the last line.
Never again was a subject forced upon me."
After this incident of her schooldays, what had been inclination
before was aroused to determination and the child neglected her
lessons to write. A volume of crude verse fashioned after the
metre of Meredith's "Lucile," a romantic book in rhyme, and two
novels were the fruits of this youthful ardour. Through the
sickness and death of a sister, the author missed the last three
months of school, but, she remarks, "unlike my schoolmates, I
studied harder after leaving school than ever before and in a
manner that did me real good. The most that can be said of what
education I have is that it is the very best kind in the world
for me; the only possible kind that would not ruin a person of my
inclinations. The others of my family had been to college; I
always have been too thankful for words that circumstances
intervened which saved my brain from being run through a groove
in company with dozens of others of widely different tastes and
mentality.
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