The rearing of the girl, withal superficial, covered a wide variety of authors and subjects. She knew French fiction so well that she couldn't become interested in the hypocritical half-way house of English-writing novelists. What's the use of writing about life, she complained to her mother, and leave life out of the story? The scabrous element in Gallic light literature amused her, but she preferred Flaubert to Paul de Kock, Balzac to Zola. Memoirs enchained her fancy. The utterances and actions of real men and women appealed. Casanova, who has left the world its most frank and complete autobiography, was for Mona as is romance to other girls of her age; Casanova, Benvenuto Cellini and the Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon. Rabelais she dismissed and for Benjamin Constant and Stendhal she only entertained mild respect. She admired the electric energy of Julien Sorel and Mathilde de la Môle, but they left her cold. As for the pessimists, Senacour, Amiel and them that confide to diaries, their pen dipped in their own salty tears, she spoke contemptuously. Weaklings, all. What if they did write charmingly? She longed for virility; that spelled charm for her. The more violent pages in the Old Testament, Shakespeare and Faust; but she held the revelation of the New Testament in moderate esteem. Too much oriental fatalism. Too much turning the "other cheek," to please her. The person of Christ seemed apochryphal. Such a man couldn't exist twenty-four hours without being killed on our murder-loving planet. Notwithstanding all these contradictions in her undeveloped character, Mona was far from being an "advanced" young woman; indeed, her classmates at college had voted her desperately old-fashioned; worse--a womanly woman. Secretly she wished that her soul could be like a jungle at night, filled with the cries of monstrous sins. But it wasn't.