She went indoors and wrote then and there to London, renewing the long-ended subscriptions to the _Times_, _Spectator_, _Clarion_, _Hibbert's Journal_, and the rest. She asked for a catalogue of the newest publications that were not novels--her determination was too serious just then for novels--ordered Herbert Spencer's "First Principles," for she felt she would like to have some principles, especially first ones, and said she would be glad of any little hint the news-agent could give her as to what he thought a married lady ought to know; and she spent the rest of the evening and the two following days laying the foundations of intellectual companionship by looking up the article _Manure_ in the "Encyclopædia Britannica" and paraphrasing it into conversational observations that sounded to her so clever when she tried them on Herr Dremmel three days later at tea-time that she was astonished herself. She was still more astonished when Herr Dremmel, having listened, remarked that her facts were wrong. "But they can't _possibly_--" she began; then broke off, feeling the awkwardness of a position in which one was unable to argue without at once revealing the "Encyclopædia." Chapter XXVII This was in May. By the end of the following May Ingeborg had read so much that she felt quite uncomfortable. It had been a fine confused reading, in which Ruskin jostled Mr. Roger Fry and Shelley lingered, as it were, in the lap of Mr. Masefield. The news-agent, who must have lived chiefly a great many years before, steadily sent her mid, early, and pre-Victorian literature; and she, ordering on her own account books advertised in the weekly papers, found herself as a result one day in the placid arms of the Lake Poets, and the next being disciplined by Mr. Marinetti, one day ambling unconcernedly with Lamb, and the next caught in the exquisite intricacies of Mr. Henry James. She read books of travel, she learned poetry by heart, she grew skilful at combining her studies with her cooking; and propping up Keats on the dresser could run to him for a fresh line in the very middle of the pudding almost without the pudding minding. And since she loved to hear the beautiful words she learned aloud, and the kitchen was full of a pleasant buzzing, a murmurous sound of sonnets as well as flies, to which the servant got used in time.