Ah, what a wonderful Saturday I have had -- first a bike ride to school and back in the warm spring air, passing so many blossoming trees and flowers, and then an afternoon of lazy reading next to a breezy window. I read some descriptive western poems by Carl Sandburg, and then a number of chapters in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. (The brave Fanny Price has my great admiration.) As usual, Austen's prose is matchless. Here are two of my favorite quotes from today:

“...how wretched, and how unpardonable, how hope-
less, and how wicked it was, to marry without affection.”

“So thought Fanny, in good truth and sober sadness, as she sat musing
over that too great indulgence and luxury of a fire upstairs; wondering at
the past and present; wondering at what was yet to come, and in a nerv-
ous agitation which made nothing clear to her but the persuasion of her
being never under any circumstances able to love Mr. Crawford, and the
felicity of having a fire to sit over and think of it.”