The influence most potent in shaping the rudimentary character of Alice Tarleton (called Roussillon) had been only such as a lonely frontier post could generate.

Her associations with men and women had, with few exceptions, been unprofitable in an educational way, while her reading in M.Roussillon's little library could not have given her any practical knowledge of manners and life.
She was fond of Rene de Ronville, and it would have been quite in accordance with the law of ordinary human forces, indeed almost the inevitable thing, for her to love and marry him in the fullness of time; but her imagination was outgrowing her surroundings.

Books had given her a world of romance wherein she moved at will, meeting a class of people far different from those who actually shared her experiences.
Her day-dreams and her night-dreams partook much more of what she had read and imagined than of what she had seen and heard in the raw little world around her.
Her affection for Rene was interfered with by her large admiration for the heroic, masterful and magnetic knights who charged through the romances of the Roussillon collection.

For although Rene was unquestionably brave and more than passably handsome, he had no armor, no war-horse, no shining lance and embossed shield--the difference, indeed, was great.
Those who love to contend against the fatal drift of our age toward over-education could find in Alice Tarleton, foster daughter of Gaspard Roussillon, a primitive example, an elementary case in point.

What could her book education do but set up stumbling blocks in the path of happiness?
She was learning to prefer the ideal to the real.