My appetite for reading was omnivorous, and I devoured a great
many romances. My sisters took them from a circulating library,
many more, perhaps, than came to my parents' knowledge; but it
was not often that one escaped me, wherever it was hidden. I did
not understand what I was reading, to be sure; and that was one
of the best and worst things about it. The sentimentalism of some
of those romances was altogether unchildlike; but I did not take
much of it in. It was the habit of running over pages and pages
to get to the end of a story, the habit of reading without caring
what I read, that I know to have been bad for my mind. To use a
nautical expression, my brain was in danger of getting "water-
logged." There are so many more books of fiction written
nowadays, I do not see how the young people who try to read one
tenth of them have any brains left for every-day use.
One result of my infantile novel-reading was that I did not like
to look at my own face in a mirror, because it was so unlike that
of heroines, always pictured with "high white foreheads" and
"cheeks of a perfect oval.
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