Silas Marner — книга для чтения (B1)

a preeminently exclusive disposition. She was affectionate proud, and sensitive in the highest degree." This early character isworth considering, for what she was as a child, that she continued to be through a life that brought maturity resulting from expansion and experience.

Such a richly endowed nature was a treasury from which the future novelist could draw at will. But an internal treasurehouse needs to be stored with external experience : contact with varied and active forms of life Mary Ann had fi'om her association with her brother and father. The unconscious education of farm life, the romping play with a brother, in the barns, over the fields, and in the woods, the association with her father in his superintendence of the laborers, — all these gave to Mary Ann a close view of real life, a grasp on its stern facts, and a knowledge of its details, its picturesque aspects, and its types of peasant character.

Her father's business, moreover, gave him a social station midway between that of the farmers and that of the gentry whose estates he managed. This social contact gave the needed aspiration and stimulus.