But the Ledwiths made a strong party; and they lived close by; there were plans continually.

Since Leslie Goldthwaite and Barbara Holabird were married and gone, and the Roger Marchbankses were burned out, and had been living in the city and travelling, the Hobarts and the Haddens and Ruth and Rosamond and Pen Pennington had kept less to their immediate Westover neighborhood than ever; and had come down to Lucilla’s, and to Maddy Freeman’s, and the Inglesides, as often as they had induced them to go up to the Hill.

Maud Marchbanks and the Hendees were civil and neighborly enough at home, but they did not care to “ramify.”  So it came to pass that they were left a good deal to themselves.  Olivia and Adelaide, when they came up to Westover, to their uncle’s, wondered “that papa cared to build again; there really wasn’t anything to come for; West Hill was entirely changed.”

So it was; and a very good thing.

I came across the other day, reading over Mr. Kingsley’s “Two Years Ago,” a true word as to social needs in England, that reminded me of this that the Holabirds and the Penningtons and the Inglesides have been doing, half unconsciously, led on from “next” to next, in Z——.

Mr. Kingsley, after describing a Miss Heale, and others of her class,—­the middle class, with no high social opportunities, and with time upon their hands, wasted often in false dreams of life and unsatisfied expectations, “bewildering heart and brain with novels,” for want of a nobler companionship, says this:  “Till in country villages, the ladies who interest themselves about the poor will recollect that the farmers’ and tradesmens’ daughters are just as much in want of their influence as the charity children and will yield a far richer return for their labor, so long will England be full of Miss Heales.”

If a kindly influence and fellowship are the duty of the aristocratic girls of England toward their “next,” below, how far more false are American girls to the spirit of their country, and the blessed opportunities of republican sympathies and equalities, when they try to draw invisible lines between themselves and those whose outer station differs by but so little, and whose hearts and minds, under the like culture with their own, crave, just as they do, the best that human intercourse can give.  Social science has something to do, before—­or at least simultaneously with—­reaching down to the depths where all the wrongs and blunders and mismanagements of life have precipitated their foul residuum.  A master of one of our public schools, speaking of the undue culture of the brain and imagination, in proportion to the opportunities offered socially for living out ideas thus crudely gathered, said that his brightest girls were the ones who in after years, impatient of the little life gave them to satisfy the capacities and demands aroused and developed during the brief period of school life, and fed afterwards