She could have said so much, but whatsoever she had said would have conveyed nothing to them, so she thought it all out alone.

She went over the whole ground and little realised how much she was teaching herself as she turned and tossed in her narrow, spotlessly white bed at night, arguing, comparing, drawing deductions from what she knew and did not know of the two continents.

Her childish anger, combining itself with the practical, alert brain of Reuben Vanderpoel the first, developed in her a logical reasoning power which led her to arrive at many an excellent and curiously mature conclusion.

The result was finely educational.

All the more so that in her fevered desire for justification of the things she loved, she began to read books such as little girls do not usually take interest in.