"To go back to that summer; I was in my sixteenth year, and the policy of expansion was to have begun. But father's health broke, and mama was traveling with him and a cortège of nurses, trying one change after another. It was duller than ever at the ranch. We sat down three at table in a dining-room forty feet long, Aunt Isabel Dwight, Fräulein Henschel, and myself. Fräulein was the resident governess. She was a great, soft-hearted, injudicious creature, a mass of German interjections, but she had the grand style on the piano. There had been weeks of such weather as we are having now. Exercise was impossible till after sundown. I had dreamed of a breath of freedom, but instead of the open door I was in straiter bonds than ever. "I revolted first against keeping hours. I would not get up to breakfast, I refused to study, it was too hot to practice. I took my own head about books, and had my first great orgy of the Russians. I used to lie beside a chink of light in the darkened library and read while Fräulein in the music-room held orgies of her own. She had just missed being a great singer; but she was a master of her instrument, and her accompaniments were divine. What voice she had was managed with feeling and a pure method, and where voice failed her the piano thrilled and sobbed, and broke in chords like the sea. "I can give you no idea of the effect that Tolstoi, combined with Fräulein's music, had upon me. My heart hung upon the pauses in her song; it beat, as I read, as if I had been running. I would forget to breathe between the pages. One day Fräulein came in and found me in the back chapters of 'Anna Karénina.' She had been playing one of Lizst's rhapsodies--the twelfth. Waves of storm and passion had been thundering through the house, with keen little rifts of melody between, too sweet almost to be endured. She was very negligée, as the weather obliged us to be. Her great white arms were bare above the elbow, and as wet as if she had been over the wash-tub. "'That is not a book for a _jeune fille_,' she said. "I was in a rapture of excitement; the interruption made me wild. 'All the books are for me,' I told her. 'I will read what I please.' "'You will go mad!' "I went on reading. "'You have no way to work it off. You will not study, you cannot sing, you write no letters, the mother does not believe'-- "'Do go away!' I cried. "'--in the duty to the neighbor. Ach! what will you do with the whole of 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.'