Darted through Pomfret Towers, in which six young people asked to Lord Pomfret's estate pair off. Alice Barton, the heroine, is so very frail one feels that turning the page may injure her. She nearly causes a fight when one suitor learns that another had been speaking with her in a room prone to damp. She is asked to lay down and rest a lot and inexplicably none of the assembled young people act in any way except idolatrous towards her, constantly checking to see that she is enjoying herself. In America she would have been shunned by all but the very saintly.Any normal sensibility would wish the moon coming from behind the clouds would frighten her to death or a butterfly land on her like an anvil or the barometric pressure cause her to explode.
Here she falls in love for the first time:
.... as those staggering phenomena met her eyes, Alice felt that the culminating point of her whole visit had been reached in one blinding, searing moment. In that flash of ecstasy she suddenly knew what all poetry, all music, all sculpture, except things like winged Assyrian bulls, or the very broken pieces in the British Museum meant.
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