This was only one of the many difficulties she brought herself into during the next few weeks. She plunged into a perfect whirlpool of novel reading. As fast as one book was devoured Hester provided another. She read “The Fatal Marriage,” “The Terrible Secret,” “A Bridge of Love,” “Lady Gwendoline’s Dream,” and “Lord Lynn’s Choice,” besides many more. She read while she was dressing, and snatched every moment through the day. She even sat up nights and pored over those fascinating books, when she should have been sleeping. Sometimes she stole out in the evening and walked up and down the street with Hester, and talked them over. So she constantly lived in another world. She was in a frenzy of eagerness to get through whatever she was doing, and drown all her senses in a book. As a natural consequence, nothing went well with her. She hated her lot and its duties. She longed to get away and live with the beautiful, unreal people she had read about. Novel-readers are usually cross. Poor Margaret was very cross. She disputed constantly with Weston, and boxed Johnnie’s ears when he teased her. He turned everything into rhymes, so when he had succeeded in putting her into a rage, he would leave off singing, “Aunt Ameliar, She’s a pealer,” and would dance about Margaret, shouting in her ears, “Mag is mad, And I am glad.” This would make Margaret very angry, and sometimes the two had what Amelia called “a scuffle.” She would interfere at last and declare, as Johnnie ran off laughing, that Margaret was the “worst of the whole pack if she was a church member. She would rather be nothing than a hypocrite.” And Margaret in these days was impertinent to her step-mother and jerked things about in a way that is very trying to a sick person. She left undone all she possibly could, allowed great holes to come in her stockings, and went about slip-shod, with the buttons nearly gone from her shoes, and did not take the “stitch in time” that “saves nine.” There were worse neglects, too. Since this fatal disease of novel-reading had come upon her she did not read her Bible scarcely at all. On Sunday afternoons she held it a while and gazed out of the window, then went hurriedly through a chapter without knowing a word that was in it. As if the Bible would do one any more good than the geography unless its words were understood and treasured up. It was the same with prayer. She forgot it entirely, or she murmured a sentence or two while she was running down-stairs in the morning or after she was in bed at night. It was mere form, and not true praying at all.