t aloud
to the family circle in an evening, and then its dangerous magic would
have been decreased; but she read it beforehand, privately to herself
during the night, and it drew her into the bewildering magic circle. She
thought of nothing, dreamed of nothing, but wonderful adventure;
wonderfully beautiful ladies, and wonderfully brave heroes! She was
herself always one of them, worshipped or worshipping; now combating,
cross in hand, against witches and dragons; now wandering in dreamy
moonlight among lilies in the Lady Minnetrost's Castle. It seemed as if
the chaotic confusion of Petrea's brain had here taken shape and
stature, and she now took possession with redoubled force of the
phantasy world, which once before, under the guise of the Wood-god, had
carried away her childish mind and conducted her into false tracks; and
it was so even now; for while she moved night and day in a dream-world
in which she luxuriated to exultation, in magnificent and wonderful
scenes, in which she herself always played a part, she got on but
lamentably in real and every-day life. The head in which so many
splendid pictures and grand schemes were agitating, looked generally
something like a bundle of flax; she never noticed the holes and specks
in her dress, nor her ragged stockings and trodden-down shoes; she
forgot all her little, every-day business, and whatever she had in her
hand she either lost or dropped.

She had, besides, a passion for cracking almonds. "A passion," Louise
said, "as expensive as it was noisy, and which never was stronger than
when she went about under the influence of the magic ring; and that
perpetual crack! crack! which was heard wherever she went, and the
almond shells on which people trod, or which hung to the sleeve of
whoever came to the window, were anything but agreeable."

Whenever Petrea was deservedly reproved or admonished for these things,
she fell out of the clouds, or rather out of her heaven, down to the
earth, which seemed to her scarcely anything else than a heap of nettles
and brambles, and very gladly indeed would she have bought with ten
years of her life one year of the magic power of the "Magic Ring,"
together with beauty, magic charms, power, and such-like things, which
she did not possess, except in her dreams.

Petrea's life was a cleft between an ideal and a real world, of both of
which she knew nothing truly, and which, therefore, could not become
amalgamated in her soul. Rivers