(I'm just copying parts that I wrote in my diary :-)
Reading Greatheart while walking for exercise, and yes, a little while after that. Written by Ethel Dell back in the 1910s. It's a wonderful book, absolutely wonderful. It's so thoughtful, so deep and complicated. The characters have consciences and feel that confusion and obligation that civilized Christians should, which is much different from the way people are assumed to behave today. Even the character is named after one in Pilgrim's Progress! The girl in this story is a tame, happy, sweet little thing, Cinderella she may be, but she's absolutely destined for the sweet and self-sacrificing younger brother of the Prince. The Prince is an alpha male, aristocratic, autocratic and overwhelming, and perfectly matched by a society beauty without much imagination. There gets to be a mismatch as Cinderella is thrilled to have gotten the Prince for once in her life and we, the dear readers, are in mortal terror for a while.
"I believe I could do lots of things if I only had the chance," she murmured to herself; and then she was suddenly plunged into the memory of another occasion when she had received summary and austere punishment for omitting scales from her practising. But then no one ever liked doing what they must, and she had never had any real taste for music; or if she had had, it had vanished long since under the uninspiring goad of compulsion.
But Isabel's hand was on hers in a moment; her eyes, full of understanding, looked earnest friendship into hers. "Oh, I know," she said. "It is the little things that gall us all, until--until some great--some fundamental--sorrow wrenches our very lives in twain. And then--and then--one can almost laugh to think one ever cared about them."
