There is always plenty for me to do , helping Aunt Janet about the house . I can do a great many things '' -- she glanced up at him with a pretty pride as her flying pencil traced the words . `` I can cook and sew . Aunt Janet says I am a very good housekeeper , and she does not praise people very often or very much . And then , when I am not helping her , I have my dear , dear violin . That is all the company I want . But I like to read and hear of the big world so far away and the people who live there and the things that are done . It must be a very wonderful place . '' `` Would n't you like to go out into it and see its wonders and meet those people yourself ? '' he asked , smiling at her . At once he saw that , in some way he could not understand , he had hurt her . She snatched her pencil and wrote , with such swiftness of motion and energy of expression that it almost seemed as if she had passionately exclaimed the words aloud , `` No , no , no . I do not want to go anywhere away from home . I do not want ever to see strangers or have them see me . I could not bear it . '' He thought that possibly the consciousness of her defect accounted for this . Yet she did not seem sensitive about her dumbness and made frequent casual references to it in her written remarks . Or perhaps it was the shadow on her birth . Yet she was so innocent that it seemed unlikely she could realize or understand the existence of such a shadow . Eric finally decided that it was merely the rather morbid shrinking of a sensitive child who had been brought up in an unwholesome and unnatural way .
XXXXX last the lengthening shadows warned him that it was time to go .
At about as from into of on that to with