Fanny Brandeis had a way of going to the public library on
Saturday afternoons (with a bag of very sticky peanut candy
in her pocket, the little sensualist!) and there, huddled in
a chair, dreamily and almost automatically munching peanut
brittle, her cheeks growing redder and redder in the close
air of the ill-ventilated room, she would read, and read,
and read. There was no one to censor her reading, so she
read promiscuously, wading gloriously through trash and
classic and historical and hysterical alike, and finding
something of interest in them all.
She read the sprightly "Duchess" novels, where mad offers of
marriage were always made in flower-scented conservatories;
she read Dickens, and Thelma, and old bound Cosmopolitans,
and Zola, and de Maupassant, and the "Wide, Wide World," and
"Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates," and "Jane Eyre." All
of which are merely mentioned as examples of her
catholicism in literature. As she read she was unaware
of the giggling boys and girls who came in noisily, and made
dates, and were coldly frowned on by the austere Miss
Perkins, the librarian.
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