But the
girl, the soon-to-be woman, Damaris choked it down bravely. For nobody,
nothing--so she assured herself, going back to the lesson learned
yesterday upon the open moorland--is really inevitable unless you suffer
or will it so to be. Wherefore she stiffened herself against recognition
of loneliness, stiffened herself against inclination to mourning, refused
to acquiesce in or be subjugated by either and, to the better forgetting
of them, sought consolation among her great-great uncle's books.
For at this period Damaris was an omnivorous reader, eager for every form
of literature and every description of knowledge--whether clearly
comprehended or not--which the beloved printed page has to give. An
eagerness, it may be noted, not infrequently productive of collisions
with Theresa, and at this particular juncture all the more agreeable to
gratify on that very account. For Theresa would have had her walk only in
the narrow, sheltered, neatly bordered paths of history and fiction
designed, for the greater preservation of female innocence, by such
authors as Miss Sewell, Miss Strickland, and Miss Yonge.
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