Zola's novel, L'Œuvre; a pamphlet by Bakunin and an odd number of the Gids; a copy of The Imitation which had strayed among Van der Welcke's books; Gonse on Japanese Art; Tolstoi's novels and pamphlets. But it was a strange bold power of discrimination that at once taught her to pick and choose amid the chaos of all this literature, made her accept this and reject that: a psychological analysis; a new work on modern social evolution; an æsthetic rhapsody about a Japanese vase. She learnt quickly to look into them boldly and to take from them what was able as it were to develop her; and out of many of those books there flashed forth such entirely new revelations of hitherto unperceived truths that often, tired, dazed, astounded, she asked herself:
"Is there so much then? Is so much thought about, dreamt about, so much sought for, lived for? Do people have those visions then, those dreams? And does it all exist? And can it all be taken in by me, by my intelligence?"
And, as she thought, it seemed as if crape veils were being raised everywhere from before her and as if she, whose gaze had never wandered from her family and friends, now saw, suddenly, through the distant clouds, right into those cities, right into those civilizations, into the future, into the past, into so much of the present as still hovered closely around her own existence. She experienced shock after shock: she felt dimly that even the terrible French
