Countenance occurs frequently in the King James Bible, so maybe that’s where she picked it up.

My ex-wife’s father once bought me a subscription to the Reader’s Digest. He thought I liked it because I used to read it whenever we visited them. I read it because there was nothing else in his house worth reading. He was a high-school German teacher and a former Lutheran minister, and all the reading material in his house was either Lutheran theology, or conservative politics, or was written in German --plus there was the Reader’s Digest.

I’ll have to say: Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope – because I read it aloud to my wife while she knitted an afghan. We did the same with The Mayor of Casterbridge but that’s a shorter book.