She groped for knowledge in old books, and found it in repulsive chunks, but she did not naturally care for books and thus never troubled her head about the censorship which was exercised first by her aunts, later by her father.

Friends might have told her things, but she had few of her own age,--Richmond being an awkward place to reach,--and, as it happened, the only girl she knew well was a religious zealot, who in the fervour of intimacy talked about God, and the best ways of taking up one's cross, a topic only fitfully interesting to one whose mind reached other stages at other times.
But lying in her chair, with one hand behind her head, the other grasping the knob on the arm, she was clearly following her thoughts intently.

Her education left her abundant time for thinking.

Her eyes were fixed so steadily upon a ball on the rail of the ship that she would have been startled and annoyed if anything had chanced to obscure it for a second.

She had begun her meditations with a shout of laughter, caused by the following translation from _Tristan_: In shrinking trepidation His shame he seems to hide While to the king his relation He brings the corpse-like Bride.
Seems it so senseless what I say?
She cried that it did, and threw down the book.