“Why have you kept Louisa May Alcott out of Teseris’s and Eksi’s lives?” she demanded out of the blue.
“What?” His tone was quite different. “Prudencia, what is the matter with you? Did you have enough breakfast?”
“Quite enough, thank you. So tell me, why?”
He stared at her for a moment in silence.
“If I weren’t a gentleman, I’d take your temperature right now. What on earth are you talking about?”
“I’m talking aboutLittle Women, of course.”
“Little Women? What the hell hasLittle Womengot to do with it?”
The librarian cleared her throat, to buy herself some time.
“It’s got nothing to do with it directly.”
He stared at her in growing disbelief.
“I’m waiting for you to explain.”
“Let me see,” Miss Prim summoned all her powers of improvisation and looked gravely at the Man in the Wing Chair. “In a way, we are what we read.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I’m saying that in a way we are the product of our reading.”
“Really? That’s very interesting, and it gives me some ideas about you.”
She drew herself up, determined not to be browbeaten.
“We’re not talking about me, we’re talking about Miss Mott.”
“I was under the impression we were talking about Louisa May Alcott.”
“You don’t see any connection between what’s happened to Eugenia and what she’s read, is that right?”
“That’s right, I don’t.” The Man in the Wing Chair looked at the floor, a grin playing across his lips. “Prudencia, if you’re trying to distract me with a deliberately preposterous argument so that I stop regretting my part in Eugenia’s misfortune, believe me I’m grateful. But don’t try to make me accept this nonsense about our being what we read. It’s not worthy of you.”
She began pacing around the classroom in an agitated fashion.
“I don’t think it’s nonsense. I can’t speak for you, but for myself I can say that my personality has been molded to a large extent by the books I’ve read. That’s why,” she said, wringing her hands, “it concerns me to find gaps in the girls’ literary education. I’m not saying they’re deliberate gaps—maybe I was too hasty—but they are gaps nonetheless. And they’re no doubt due to the fact that, hard as you might try, you are not a woman.”
“Hard as I might try?”
Miss Prim made a face.
“What I mean is—”
“I know perfectly well what you mean. My dear Prudencia,” the Man in the Wing Chair laughed as he noticed the turkey for the first time, “if anyone’s concerned about the role of literature in the children’s lives, it’s me. I’ve carefully chosen not only which books, but when and how they become part of my nieces’ and nephews’ existence.”
The librarian was about to speak, but he stopped her with a decisive glance.
“Despite the chaos you see in my library and in my house in general—the mess that bothers you so greatly—there’s not so much as a single improvised comma in the children’s education. Every book that passes through their hands has passed through mine first. It’s no coincidence that they read Lewis Carroll before Dickens, and Dickens before Homer. There was nothing fortuitous in the fact that they learned to rhyme with Robert Louis Stevenson before getting to Tennyson, and that they were introduced to Tennyson before Virgil. They met Snow White, Peter Rabbit, and the Lost Boys before Oliver Twist, Gulliver, and Robinson Crusoe, and those before Ulysses, Don Quixote, Faust, and King Lear. They read things in that order because that’s what I wanted. They’re being brought up with good books so that later they can absorb great books. And, by the way, before you start expounding your annoying, cerebral educational theories, I know perfectly well that every child is different. That’s why they set the pace, not me. But the rungs on the ladder they’re climbing have been put there by me, using the experience accumulated over centuries by others before me. Others to whom I’m profoundly grateful.”
Miss Prim, who’d listened carefully, cleared her throat gently before speaking.
“AndLittle Women? Where does it fit into this plan? I’m sure it doesn’t count as a great book, but I hope there’s room for it in the good books category.”
