"How glorious!" cried Jane, as her eyes ranged over the ranks and rows of formal and costly bindings. It all seemed doubly glorious after that poor sole book-case of theirs at home--a huge black-walnut thing like a wardrobe, and with a couple of drawers at the bottom, receptacles that seemed less adapted to pamphlets than to goloshes. "How grand!" Jane was not exigent as regarded music, but her whole being went forth towards books. "Dickens and Thackeray and Bulwer and Hume and Gibbon, and Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets', and--"
"And twenty or thirty yards of Scott," Mrs. Bates broke in genially; "and enough Encyclopædia Britannica to reach around the corner and back again. Sets--sets--sets."
"What a lovely chair to sit and study in!" cried Jane, not at all abashed by her hostess's comments. "What a grand table to sit and write papers at!" Writing papers was one of Jane's chief interests.
"Oh, yes," said Mrs. Bates with a quiet toleration, as she glanced towards the shining inkstand and the immaculate blotting-pad. "But really, I don't suppose I've written two lines at that table since it was put there. And as for all these books, Heaven only knows where the keys are to get at them with. _I_ can't do anything with them; why, some of them weigh five or six pounds!"
Jane shriveled and shivered under this. She regretted doubly that she had been betrayed into such an unstinted expression of her honest interest. "All for show and display," she muttered, as she bowed her head to search out new titles; "bought by the pound and stacked by the cord; doing nobody any good--their owners least of all." She resolved to admire openly nothing more whatever.
Mrs. Bates sank into one of the big chairs and motioned Jane towards another. "Your father was a great reader," she said, with a resumption of her retrospective expression. "He was very fond of books--especially poetry. He often read aloud to me; when he thought I was likely to be alone, he would bring his Shakespeare over. I believe I could give you even now, if I was put to it, Antony's address to the Romans. Yes; and almost all of Hamlet's soliloquies, too."
Jane was preparing to make a stand against this woman; and here apparently was the opportunity. "Do you mean to tell me," she inquired, with something approaching sternness, "that my father--_my father_--was ever fond of poetry and--and music, and--and all that sort of thing?"