What unspeakable folly! To write--was not that the joy and the privilege of one who had an urgent message for the world?
Her father, she knew well, had no such message; he had abandoned all thought of original production, and only wrote about writing.
She herself would throw away her pen with joy but for the need of earning money.

And all these people about her, what aim had they save to make new books out of those already existing, that yet newer books might in turn be made out of theirs?
This huge library, growing into unwieldiness, threatening to become a trackless desert of print--how intolerably it weighed upon the spirit! Oh, to go forth and labour with one's hands, to do any poorest, commonest work of which the world had truly need! It was ignoble to sit here and support the paltry pretence of intellectual dignity.

A few days ago her startled eye had caught an advertisement in the newspaper, headed 'Literary Machine'; had it then been invented at last, some automaton to supply the place of such poor creatures as herself to turn out books and articles?
Alas! the machine was only one for holding volumes conveniently, that the work of literary manufacture might be physically lightened.

But surely before long some Edison would make the true automaton; the problem must be comparatively such a simple one.
Only to throw in a given number of old books, and have them reduced, blended, modernised into a single one for to-day's consumption.
The fog grew thicker; she looked up at the windows beneath the dome and saw that they were a dusky yellow.

Then her eye discerned an official walking along the upper gallery, and in pursuance of her grotesque humour, her mocking misery, she likened him to a black, lost soul, doomed to wander in an eternity of vain research along endless shelves.
Or again, the readers who sat here at these radiating lines of desks, what were they but hapless flies caught in a huge web, its nucleus the great circle of the Catalogue?
Darker, darker.