whirlwind
She had been on the fringe of the class called educated, with a mind sufficiently at leisure to enjoy noticing things, and speculating over them, and reading books from the public library in order to learn more exactly about them. But this was a long time ago, and the scraps of knowledge she had then accumulated lay like a heap of dead leaves, broomed away into an unfrequented corner of her mind and only stirring now and then, and only the lightest and least significant of them stirring, at that.