Chapter 19Susan spent a dusty morning finishing up the Victorian novelists. There seemed to be an incredible number of them. An entire set of Mrs. Henry Wood, including no less than three copies of the famous East Lynne. A notorious tear-jerker—but three copies! There were also sets of Charlotte M. Yonge, an author beloved by Susan’s Aunt Lucy, and whose descriptions of vast Victorian families she herself had always found enthralling. There they were, in their original editions, and obviously well read. She remembered to have heard that strong men in the Crimea with death and disease running riot all about them had wept when the ill-fated Heir of Redclyffe died upon his honeymoon.
There was something tranquilizing about the ebb and flow of these family histories, even when they dealt with
