"I must say, Alex, I think that's rather a ridiculous thing to say."
Alex was silent, but from that day the spirit of resentment had at last awakened within her.
She became irritable, and although she still strove to persuade herself that her engagement meant the ultimate realization of happiness, she often spoke impatiently to Noel, and no longer sought to conform herself to the type of womanhood which he obviously desired and expected to find her.
The old sense of "waiting for the next thing" was strong upon her, and she spent her days in desultory idleness, since Lady Isabel made fewer engagements for her, and Noel's calls upon her time were far from excessive.
She made the discovery then, less illuminating at the time than when viewed afterwards in retrospect, that she could not bear to read novels.
All of them, sooner or later, seemed to deal with the relations between a man and a woman in love, and Alex found herself reading of emotions and experiences of which her own seemed so feeble a mockery, that she was conscious of a physical pang of sick disappointment.
Was all fiction utterly untrue to life? or was hers the counterfeit, while the printed pages but reproduced something of a reality which was denied to her?
She dared not face the question, and was further perplexed by the axiom mechanically passed on by successive authorities in rebuke of her childhood's passion for reading:
"You can't learn anything about Real Life from story-books."
At all events, Alex found the story-books of no solace to her mental sickness, and turned away from their perusal with a sinking heart.