"I can give you no idea of the effect that Tolstoi, combined with Fräulein's music, had upon me. My heart hung upon the pauses in her song; it beat, as I read, as if I had been running. I would forget to breathe between the pages. One day Fräulein came in and found me in the back chapters of 'Anna Karénina.' She had been playing one of Lizst's rhapsodies—the twelfth. Waves of storm and passion had been thundering through the house, with keen little rifts of melody between, too sweet almost to be endured. She was very negligée, as the weather obliged us to be. Her great white arms were bare above the elbow, and as wet as if she had been over the wash-tub.
"'That is not a book for a jeune fille,' she said.
"I was in a rapture of excitement; the interruption made me wild. 'All the books are for me,' I told her. 'I will read what I please.'
"'You will go mad!'
"I went on reading.
"'You have no way to work it off. You will not study, you cannot sing, you write no letters, the mother does not believe'—
"'Do go away!' I cried.
"'—in the duty to the neighbor. Ach! what will you do with the whole of Tolstoi and Turgenieff shut up within you?'
"'I can ride,' I said. 'If you don't want me to go mad, leave me in the evenings to myself. Take my place in the carriage with Aunt Isabel, and let me ride alone.'
"Fräulein had lived in bonds herself, and she had the soul of an artist. She knew what it is, for days together, to have barely an hour to one's own thoughts; never to step out alone of a summer night, after a long, hot, feverish day. She let me go with old Manuel, the head groom, as my escort. He was no more hindrance to solitude than a pine-tree or a post.