Page:An Epistle to Posterity.djvu/32

Rh unrivalled. Then Keene was an agreeable, sociable place, full of scholarly men and handsome matrons, who had homes to which any one would like to be invited. We had parties and balls, and occasionally a military ball, and I never imagined that there was such a thing as ennui. We read prodigiously, and that atmosphere of culture for which Boston has been so much, perhaps, laughed at penetrated to our very midst. We were intimate with the Sage of Weimar and with Thomas Carlyle. Emerson came up to lecture to us, and we welcomed the first little green books which emanated from Boz and the yellow-colored Thackerays. The first yellow cover I ever saw held Becky Sharp in its embrace. It was the purest and best society I have seen. No unclean thing came near it. But — alas that there is always a but! — my mother's clear blue eyes, sharp as a Damascus blade, cut through the dignified pretensions of Miss F——— 's school. She found out that I was individually learning nothing, and I was surprised one night reading Miss Edgeworth's Helen at the hour of two in the morning.

I have always illogically wished that Miss Edgeworth, now sunk into undeserved oblivion, could have lived to hear that anybody sat up all night to read her decorous Helen. What fin-de-siècle girl will do it now?

But I hurt nothing but my eyes in this nocturnal impropriety. The one candle was blown out, and I was rebuked. My mother told me that Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Selden had called on her the day before to say that they feared Mary Elizabeth was reading too many novels; that Mr. Tilden, the head of the circulating library, said that the same offending M. E. took out two novels every week, while Lucretia Brown took