She took it from the shelf and glanced through it, scanning a page here and there, for she was a rapid reader.

Then, finding that it bade fair to be entertaining, down she dropped on the rug, and began at the preface.

Lunch stopped her for awhile, but, thoroughly interested, she carried the book up to her room and immediately began to read again.
When she went down to the porch before dinner that evening, she did not say to herself in so many words that maybe the Colonel would notice what she was reading, but it was with the hope that he would that she carried the book with her.

He did notice, and commended her for it, but threw her into a flutter of confusion by asking her what similarity she had noticed in the lives of those women she was reading about.
It mortified her to be obliged to confess that she had not discovered any, and she thought, as she nervously fingered the pages and looked down at her toes, "That's what I got for trying to appear smarter than I really am." "This is what I meant," he began, in his didactic way.

"Each of them made a specialty of some one thing, and devoted all her energies to accomplishing that purpose, whether it was the establishing of a salon, the discovery of a star, or the founding of a college.