Roussillon's little library could not have given her
any practical knowledge of manners and life.
She was fond of Rene de Ronville, and it would have been quite in
accordance with the law of ordinary human forces, indeed almost
the inevitable thing, for her to love and marry him in the
fullness of time; but her imagination was outgrowing her
surroundings. Books had given her a world of romance wherein she
moved at will, meeting a class of people far different from those
who actually shared her experiences. Her day-dreams and her night-
dreams partook much more of what she had read and imagined than of
what she had seen and heard in the raw little world around her.
Her affection for Rene was interfered with by her large admiration
for the heroic, masterful and magnetic knights who charged through
the romances of the Roussillon collection. For although Rene was
unquestionably brave and more than passably handsome, he had no
armor, no war-horse, no shining lance and embossed shield--the
difference, indeed, was great.
Those who love to contend against the fatal drift of our age
toward over-education could find in Alice Tarleton, foster
daughter of Gaspard Roussillon, a primitive example, an elementary
case in point. What could her book education do but set up
stumbling blocks in the path of happiness? She was learning to
prefer the ideal to the real.
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