He had said to her once, quoting some Frenchman, that she was 'good to consult about ideas.' Ah well!--at a great price had she won that praise. And with an unconscious stiffening of the frail hands lying on the arms of the chair, she thought of those bygone hours in which she had asked herself--'what remains?' Religious faith?--No!--Life was too horrible! Could such things have happened to her in a world ruled by a God?--that was her question, day and night for years. But books, facts, ideas--all the riddle of this various nature--_that_ one might still amuse oneself with a little, till one's own light went out in the same darkness that had already engulfed mother--husband--child. So that 'cleverness,' of which father and husband had taken so little account, which had been of so little profit to her so far in her course through circumstance, had come to her aid. The names and lists of the books that had passed through her hands, during those silent years of her widowhood, lived beside her stern old father, would astonish even Manisty were she to try and give some account of them. And first she had read merely to fill the hours, to dull memory. But gradually there had sprung up in her that inner sweetness, that gentle restoring flame that comes from the life of ideas, the life of knowledge, even as a poor untrained woman may approach it. She had shared it with no one, revealed it to no one. Her nature dreaded rebuffs; and her father had no words sharp enough for any feminine ambition beyond the household and the nursery. So she had kept it all to herself, till Miss Manisty, shocked as many other people had begun to be by her fragile looks, had bearded the General, and carried her off to Rome for the winter. And there she had been forced, as it were, into this daily contact with Edward Manisty, at what might well turn out to be the most critical moment of his life; when he was divided between fierce regrets for the immediate past, and fierce resolves to recover and assert himself in other ways; when he was taking up again his earlier function of man of letters in order to vindicate himself as a politician and a man of action. Strange and challenging personality!--did she yet know it fully? Ah! that winter--what a healing in it all!--what a great human experience! Yet now, as always, when her thoughts turned to the past, she did not allow them to dwell upon it long. That past lay for her in a golden haze. To explore it too deeply, or too long,--that she shrank from. All that she prayed was to press no questions, force no issues. But at least she had found in it a new reason for living; she meant to live; whereas last year she had wished to die, and all the world--dear, kind Aunt Pattie first and foremost--had thought her on the road for death.