““Learning became her. She loved the smell of the books, the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book. She learned the card catalog. She never learned more than she needed to know. She read romantic novels and she imagined that the men and women at the reading tables around her were the subject of the books. Happy passionate lives, so simple it seemed for others. She read Jane Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, stories in which the lives of the tattered poor turned out to be blissful in the end. She read about the capitals of the world, the cathedrals and minarets, the broad avenues, and the volatile and ever-expanding world of science.””
