out of touch with the world
that she had not had much initiative in trying to get hold of things.
She felt now that she had failed miserably in that, but there were years
when she was like a hurt thing that keeps in hiding, most of all wanting
to escape more hurt. It had been a weakness--she clearly saw that now,
and it had been weakening to her powers. Most of the books she had come
upon were of that shut-in life Annie scorned, written from within that
static living, and for it. People in them had the feeling it was right
people should have, unless there were bad people in the book, and then
they were very definitely bad. Many of those books had been not only
unsatisfying, but saddening to her, causing her to feel newly apart from
the experiences of people of her kind.

But now Annie's books let her glimpse a new world--a world which
questioned, a world of protest, of experiment, a world in which people
unafraid were trying to find the truth, trying to build freshly, to
supplant things outworn with the vital forms of a new reality. It was
quickening. It made her eager. She was going to take some of those books
home, she would send for others, would learn how to keep in touch with
this new world which was emerging from the old. It was like breaking out
from a closed circle. It was adventure!

Even after she went to her room that night, late though it was, she did
not go at once to bed. She sat for a time looking off at the lights of
that town for which she had so long grieved, the town that had shut her
out. The fact that it had shut her out had been a determining thing in
her life, to her spirit. She wondered now if perhaps she had not
foolishly spent herself in grieving for a thing that would have meant
little could she have had it. For it seemed now that it had remained
very much a fixed thing, and now she knew that, with it all, she herself
had not been fixed. The things of which Annie talked, things men of this
new day were expressing, roused her like this, not because they were all
new, but because of her own inner gropings. Within herself she had been
stumbling toward some of those things. Here was the sure expression of
some halting thoughts of her own. It was exciting to find that there
were people who were feeling the things that, even in that timid,
uncertain way, she had come to feel by herself. She had been half afraid
to formulate some of the things that had come into her mind. This
gathered together the