These had been given her upon various Christmasses and birthdays.

She did not care for any of them except The Imitation of Christ and Robinson Crusoe.

The Bible was spoilt for her by incessant services and Sunday School classes; The Heir of Redclyffe and Ministering Children she found absurdly sentimental and unlike any life that she had ever known; Mrs.Beeton she had never opened, and Longfellow and Kingsley's Natural History she found dull.

For Robinson Crusoe she had the intense human sympathy that all lonely people feel for that masterpiece.

The Imitation pleased her by what she would have called its common sense.
Such a passage, for example: "Oftentimes something lurketh within, or else occurreth from without, which draweth us after it.