Whether by luck or act I ot say, but I found my way to the library a full twenty minutes earlier than I had been ao attend. It was not a problem. What better place to kill time than a library? And for me, what better way to get to know someohan through her choid treatment of books?
My first impression was of the room as a whole, and it struck me by its marked difference from the rest of the house. The other rooms were thick with the corpses of suffocated words; here in the library you could breathe. Instead of being shrouded in fabric, it was a room made of wood. There were floorboards underfoot, shutters at the tall windows and the walls were lined with solid oak shelves.
It was a high room, much lohan it was wide. On one side five arched windows reached from ceiling almost to floor; at their base window seats had been installed. Fag them were five similarly shaped mirrors, positioo reflect the view outside, but tonight eg the carved panels of the shutters. The bookshelves extended from the walls into the rooms, f bays; in each recess an amber-shaded lamp laced on a small table. Apart from the fire at the far end of the room, this was the only lighting, and it created soft, ools of illumination at the edge of which rows of books melted into darkness.
Slowly I made my way down the ter of the room, taking a look to the bays on my right a. After my first glances I found myself nodding. It roper, well-maintained library. Categorized, alphabetized and , it was just as I would have do myself. All my favorites were there, with a great number of rare and valuable volumes as well as more ordinary, well-thumbed copies. Not only Jane Eyre, Wutheris, The Woman in White, but The Castle of Otranto, Lady Audley’s Secret, The Spectre Bride. I was thrilled to e across a Jekyll and Mr. Hyde so rare that my father had given up believing in its existence.
Marveling at the rich sele of volumes on Miss Winter’s shelves, I browsed my way toward the fireplace at the far end of the room. In the final bay on the right, one particular set of shelves stood it even from some distance: Instead of displaying the mellow, preemily brown stripes that were the spines of the older books, this stack showed the silvery blues, sage greens and pink-beiges of more :t decades. They were the only modern books in the room. Miss Winter’s own works. With her earliest titles at the top of the stad ;t novels at the bottom, each work was represented in its many differeions and even in different languages. I saw no Thirteen Tales, the mistitled book I had read at the bookshop, but in its uise as Tales of ge and Desperation there were more than a dozen differeions.
I selected a copy of Miss Winter’s most ret book. On page one an elderly nun arrives at a small house in the backstreets of an uown that seems to be in Italy; she is shown into a room where a pompous young man, whom we take to be English or Ameri, greets her in some surprise. (I turhe page. The first paragraphs had drawn me in, just as I had been drawn iime I had opened one of her books, and without meaning to, I began to read in ear.) The young man does not at first appreciate what the reader already uands: that his visitor has e on a grave mission, ohat will alter is life in ways he ot be expected to foresee. She begins her explanation and bears it patiently (I turhe page; I had fotten the library, fotten Miss Winter, fotten myself) whereats her with the levity of indulged youth…
And
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