“I suppose there are no good lending libraries in any of the towns near here,” she began.  “How do you get new books or magazines?”

Miss Bennett had a bright, cordial manner.  She explained that she thought there was a circulating library in every town.  When she was visiting in Quebec her friends had got a novel for her at two cents a day.  And then she said Principal Trenholme bought a good many books, and he had once told her mother that he would lend them any they chose, but they had never had time to go and look over them.  “It has,” she added, “been such an advantage to Chellaston to have a gentleman so clever as he at the college.”

“Has it?” said Sophia, willing to hear more.  “Is he very clever?”

“Oh,” cried the other, “from Oxford, you know;” and she said it in much the tone she might have said “from heaven.”

“Is it long,” asked Sophia, “since you have been in England?”

Miss Bennett said she had never been “home,” but she longed, above all things, to go.

She had, it seemed, been born in Canada, and her parents had no possessions in the mother-country, and yet she always called it “home.”  This was evidently a tradition.

Sophia, who had come from England a little tired of the conditions there, and eager for a change, felt the pathetic sameness of the discontent wrought by surfeit and by famine.

“Yet,” said she, “it is a relief to the mind to feel that one lives in a country where no worthy person is starving, and where every one has a good chance in life if he will but avail himself of it.  It seems to make me breathe more freely to know that in all this great country there is none of that necessary poverty that we have in big English towns.”

Little answer was made to this, and Sophia went on to talk of what interested her in English politics; but found that of the politics, as well as of the social condition, of the country she adored, Miss Bennett was largely ignorant.  Her interest in such matters appeared to sum itself up in a serene belief that Disraeli, then prominent, was the one prop of the English Constitution, and as adequate to his position as Atlas beneath the world.  Now, Sophia cherished many a Radical opinion of her own, and she would have enjoyed discussion; but it would have been as difficult to aim a remark at the present front of her new acquaintance as it would be for a marksman to show his skill with a cloud of vapour as a target.  Sophia tried Canadian politics, owning her ignorance and expressing her desire to understand what she had read in the newspapers since her arrival; but Miss Bennett was not sure that there was anything that “could exactly be called politics” in Canada, except that there was a Liberal party who “wanted to ruin the country by free trade.”