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FLAMING
YOUTH
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become softened and untrained and fat. The higher interests were just as much @ part of the embellishment of life to you as were flowers or games, music or friends.
What inner friends will little Pat have?
Not literature.
Shakespeare she knows because she must; the school course requires it. But he is a task, not .a delight. Thackeray is slow and Dickens a bore. Poetry is a mechanical exercise; I doubt whether a single really beautiful line of Shelley or Keats or Coleridge remains in her memory, though she can chant R. W. Service and Walt Mason. Swinburne she has read on the sly, absorbing none of the luminousness of his flame; only the heat. Similarly, Balzac means to her the ‘Contes Drolatiques,’ also furtively perused. Conrad and Wells are vague names; something to save until she is older. But O. Henry she dutifully deems a classic and is quite familiar with his tight-rope performances; proud of it, too, as evincing an up-to-date erudition. As for ‘the latest books of the day,’ she is keen on them, particularly if they happen to be some such lewd and false achievement as the intolerable ‘Arab.? Any book spoken of under the breath has for her the stimulus of a race;
she must
absorb it first and look knowing and demure when it is mentioned. The age of sex, Mona... . Her standards of casual reading are of like degree; she considers Town Topics an important chronicle and Vanity Fair a symposium of pure intellect. “Yet she has been taking a course in Literature at the school! “Science has no thrill for Pat; therefore she ignores it. Futile little courses in ‘How to Know’ things hke flowers and birds and mushrooms have gone ne deeper than the skin. No love of nature has been inculcated by them. She hardly knows the names of the great scien-
