The books she read had their influence upon that soul-population. The American novel had much the same effect upon her as the married life of her sister and her sister’s friends. She cared for but little of the literature of France, and the best of it deified love and scorned the conventions. She reveled in mediæval and ancient history and loved the English poets, and both poets and history held aloft, on pillars of fragrant and indestructible wood, her own sad ideality. * * * * * CHAPTER IV. IN THE GREEN ROOM OF LITERATURE. Hermia’s imagination in its turn demanded a safety-valve; she found it necessary, occasionally, to put her dreams into substance and sequence. In other words she wrote. Not prose. She had neither the patience nor the desire. Nor did she write poetry. She believed that no woman, save perhaps time-enveloped Sappho, ever did, and she had no idea of adding her pseudonym to the list of failures. When her brain became overcharged, she dashed off verses, wildly romantic, and with a pen heated white. There was a wail and an hysterical passion in what she wrote that took the hearts of a large class of readers by storm, and her verses found prompt acceptance by the daily and weekly papers. She had as yet aspired to nothing higher. She was distinctly aware that her versification was crude and her methods faulty. To get her verses into the magazines they must be fairly correct and almost proper, and both attainments demanded an amount of labor distasteful to her impatient nature. Of late, scarcely a week had passed without the appearance of several metrical contributions over the signature “Quirus;” and the wail and the passion were growing more piercing and tumultuous. The readers were moved, interested, or amused, according to their respective natures. The morning after the little arithmetical problem, Hermia arose early and sat down at her desk. She drew out a package of MS. and read it over twice, then determined to have a flirtation with the magazines. These verses were more skillful from a literary point of view than any of her previous work, because, for the sake of variety, she had plagiarized some good work of an English poet. The story was a charming one, dramatic, somewhat fragmentary, and a trifle less caloric than her other effusions. She revised it carefully, and mailed it, later in the day, to one of the leading New York magazines.