He was interested
and I thought him charmingly courteous and sociable. He
remained about an hour and a half in my room. When he had
departed I was in high spirits. I seemed to feel the progress my
English had made in that hour and a half
My bed was so placed that by lying prone, diagonally across it, my
head toward the window and my feet suspended in the air, I would
get excellent daylight. So this became my favorite posture when I
read in the daytime.
Thus, lying on my stomach, with a novel under my eyes and the
dictionary by my side, I would devour scores of pages. In a few
weeks, often reading literally day and night, I read through
Nicholas Nickleby and Vanity Fair.
Thackeray's masterpiece did not strike me as being in the same
class with anything by Dickens. It seemed to me that anybody in
command of bookish English ought to be able to turn out a work
like Vanity Fair, where men and things were so simple and so
natural that they impressed me like people and things I had
known. Indeed, I had a lurking feeling that I, too, could do it, after
a while at least.
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