"There was a sense in which she couldn't quite believe in violence, as if it were, in her view, too stupid to be real. I knew--from Lambert only--that her own childhood had been full of violence, emotional and physical, but she rarely referred to it other than calling it "that nonsense," or sometimes "those ridiculous people," because when she ascended to the life of the mind everything that was not the life of the mind stopped existing for her."