"You see if I don't!" Only that morning she had given a complacent glance to the long shelves of fiction, with which she expected to while away the rest of the summer.

There would be other pleasant things, she knew, drives with Mrs.
Sherman, long tramps with the girls, and many good times with Elise Walton; but there would still be left hours and hours for her to spend in the library, going from one to another of the famous novelists, like a bee in a flower garden.
"With the proper direction in her reading," the old Colonel had said, and Mary knew without telling that she would not find the proper beginning among the books of fiction.

Instinctively she felt she must turn to the volumes telling of real people and real achievements.
Biographies, journals, lives, and letters of women who had been, as the Colonel said, an honor to their sex and the most interesting of their generation.

She wished that she dared ask him to choose the first book for her, but she hadn't the courage to venture that far.

So she chose at random.
"Lives of Famous Women" was the volume that happened to attract her first, a collection of short sketches.