“Is Newcastle, then, worse than other provincial towns?”
“I only know Newcastle, but I am sure it’s worse. There are a few nice advanced people, but they go away all the time, or if they bring nice people down from London, they keep them to themselves. I never see any one worth talking to. Oh, it is hopeless—hopeless!” She shrugged her shoulders. “It is simply a form of Hades,—this life for me, for I have ‘glimpses of what might make me less forlorn,’ of a life to live, a world to move in. I feel I was not meant to merely stagnate—to vegetate—to wither gradually away, consumed by my own wasted energies. You laugh! coming straight, as you do, from that paradise of life and movement, that I am sure London is, you can have no idea of what Newcastle and my life is! Inertia kills people like me, one’s soul is starved, don’t you know?—one’s mental life has nothing to feed on, no pabulum, except books—and they are not easy to get—new books. I am the trial and pest of the libraries here!”
“You read a great deal?”
“Oh, yes. I live on books. They are the greatest possible comfort to me. They are literally my saviours. I quite sympathize with the heroine of a novel I read lately, who was kept from suicide by the sight of her favourite poets on her book-shelf! I make myself up a dream-life, don’t you know—the life I should like to live if I could choose. One dream-life, do I say?” Her eyes lightened and brightened: she was extraordinarily alert and vivid. “Two or three—a perfect orgy of dream-lives! They cost nothing. But I have always read a great deal. The classics I don’t neglect. I read Plato before I was fifteen—in Jowett’s translation, of course.”
Egidia smiled.
“And your books?”
“Don’t! don’t!” Egidia held up her hands.
“But I love them—I go to them for comfort and help. I have them all—on a shelf near my bed—a whole row of my favourites—Browning, and Meredith—and Ibsen. I am a great Ibsenite—are not you?”
“It is very fashionable!”
“Oh! but really, don’t you think—?” She was becoming quite incoherent in her excitement. “Now, Nora in the ‘Doll’s House’?—It is the story of so many of us. Only it is a mistake of Ibsen to make the husband a cheat—that seems to put him too much in the wrong, he is wrong enough, without that. Oh, Nora was so right to leave him, I think. So strong! Do you know the sound of the house door banging in that play stirs me like the sound of a trumpet?”