But books, facts, ideas--all the riddle of this various nature--_that_ one might still amuse oneself with a little, till one's own light went out in the same darkness that had already engulfed mother--husband--child.
So that 'cleverness,' of which father and husband had taken so little account, which had been of so little profit to her so far in her course through circumstance, had come to her aid.

The names and lists of the books that had passed through her hands, during those silent years of her widowhood, lived beside her stern old father, would astonish even Manisty were she to try and give some account of them.

And first she had read merely to fill the hours, to dull memory.

But gradually there had sprung up in her that inner sweetness, that gentle restoring flame that comes from the life of ideas, the life of knowledge, even as a poor untrained woman may approach it.

She had shared it with no one, revealed it to no one.