So that
she was eternally discovering new sides to him.
The other refuge for her was his store of books. Upon the shelves she
found many a treasure-trove--books that she had promised herself to
read some day when she could buy them and had leisure. Roaring Bill
had collected bits of the world's best in poetry and fiction; and last,
but by no means least, the books that stand for evolution and
revolution, philosophy, economics, sociology, and the kindred sciences.
Bill was not orderly. He could put his finger on any book he wanted,
but on his shelves like as not she would find a volume of Haeckel and
another of Bobbie Burns side by side, or a last year's novel snuggling
up against a treatise on social psychology. She could not understand
why a man--a young man--with the intellectual capacity to digest the
stuff that Roaring Bill frequently became immersed in should choose to
bury himself in the wilderness. And once, in an unguarded moment, she
voiced that query. Bill closed a volume of Nietzsche, marking the
place with his forefinger, and looked at her thoughtfully over the book.
"Well," he said, "there are one or two good and sufficient reasons, to
which you, of course, may not agree.
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