“
Well, tell me boy," she said, "what have you been reading?"
Craftily he picked his way across the waste land of printery,
naming as his favorites those books which he felt would win her
approval. As he had read everything, good and bad, that the town
library contained, he was able to make an impressive showing.
Sometimes she stopped him to question about a book--he rebuilt the
story richly with a blazing tenacity of detail that satisfied her
wholly. She was excited and eager--she saw at once how abundantly
she could feed this ravenous hunger for knowledge, experience,
wisdom. And he knew suddenly the joy of obedience: the wild
ignorant groping, the blind hunt, the desperate baffled desire was
now to be ruddered, guided, controlled. The way through the
passage to India, that he had never been able to find, would now be
charted for him. Before he went away she had given him a fat
volume of nine hundred pages, shot through with spirited engravings
of love and battle, of the period he loved best.
He was drowned deep at midnight in the destiny of the man who
killed the bear, the burner of windmills and the scourge of
banditry, in all the life of road and tavern in the Middle Ages, in
valiant and beautiful Gerard, the seed of genius, the father of
Erasmus. Eugene thought The Cloister and the Hearth the best story
he had ever read.
”
”