Yet it was anything but trash which she now discovered upon the dusty shelves.
There was _Tom Jones_ in four volumes and the _Spectator_ in eight, _Gil Blas_ and the works of Swift, all with the long "s," and backs like polished oak; in the lower shelves were Hogarth and Gillray in rare folios; at every level and on either hand were books worth taking out.
But this was almost all that Rachel did; she took them out and put them in again, for that was her unsettled mood.

She spent some minutes over the Swifts, but not sufficiently attracted to march off with them.

The quaint, obsolete type of the various volumes attracted her more as a curiosity than as readable print; the coarse satires of the early masters of caricature and cartoon did not attract her at all.

Rachel's upbringing had deprived her of the traditions, the superstitions, and the shibboleths which are at once a strength and a weakness of the ordinary English education; if, however, she was too much inclined to take a world's masterpiece exactly as she found it, her taste, such as it was, at all events was her own.
She had naturally an open mind, but it was not open now; it was full and running over with the mysteries and the perplexities of her own environment.

Books would not take her out of herself; in them she could not hope to find a key to any one of the problems within problems which beset and tortured her.