Excerpt from A Sweet Devouring by Eudora Welty
1
Our library in those days was a big rotunda lined with shelves. A copy of V. V.’s Eyes seemed to follow you wherever you went, even after you’d read it. I didn’t know what I liked, I just knew what there was a lot of. After Randy’s Spring there came Randy’s Summer, Randy’s Fall, and Randy’s Winter. True, I didn’t care very much myself for her spring, but it didn’t occur to me that I might not care for her summer, and then her summer didn’t prejudice me against her fall, and I still had hopes as I moved on to her winter. I was disappointed in her whole year, as it turned out, but a thing like that didn’t keep me from wanting to read every word of it. The pleasures of reading itself—who doesn’t remember?—were like those of a cake, a sweet devouring. The “Randy Books” failed chiefly in being so soon over. Four seasons doesn’t make a series.
2
All that summer I used to put on a second petticoat (our librarian wouldn’t let you past the front door if she could see through you), ride my bicycle up the hill and “through the Capitol” (shortcut) to the library with my two read books in the basket (two was the limit you could take out at one time when you were a child and also as long as you lived), and tiptoe in (“Silence”) and exchange them for two more in two minutes. Selection was no object. I coasted the two new books home, jumped out of my petticoat, read (I suppose I ate and bathed and answered questions put to me), then in all hope put my petticoat back on and rode those two books back to the library to get my next two.
3
The librarian was the lady in town who wanted to be it. She called me by my full name and said, “Does your mother know where you are? You know good and well the fixed rule of this library: Nobody is going to come running back here with any book on the same day they took it out. Get both those things out of here and don’t come back till tomorrow. And I can practically see through you.”
4
My great-aunt in Virginia, who understood better about needing more to read than you could read, sent me a book so big it had to be read on the floor—a bound volume of six or eight issues of St. Nicholas1 from a previous year. In the very first pages a series began: The Lucky Stone by Abbie Farwell Brown. I gobbled up installment after installment through the whole luxurious book, through the last one, and then came the words, turning me to unlucky stone: “To be concluded.” The book had come to an end and The Lucky Stone wasn’t finished! I couldn’t believe this infidelity from my aunt. I still had my secret childhood feeling that if you hunted long enough in a book’s pages, you could find what you were looking for, and long after I knew books better than that, I used to hunt again for the end of The Lucky Stone. It never occurred to me that the story had an existence anywhere else outside the pages of that single green-bound book. The last chapter was just something I would have to do without. Polly Pepper could do it. And then suddenly I tried something—I read it again, as much as I had of it. I was in love with books at least partly for what they looked like; I loved the printed page.

How is Paragraph 1 important to the rest of the passage?

It provides a description of the library.

It identifies the titles of popular children’s books.

It establishes the narrator’s love for reading.

It reveals the narrator’s disappointment in the library.