‘A great deal better I should think,’ said Miss Browning with some severity.  For she had got many of her notions of the metropolis from the British Essayists, where town is so often represented as the centre of dissipation, corrupting country wives and squires’ daughters, and unfitting them for all their duties by the constant whirl of its not always innocent pleasures.  London was a sort of moral pitch, which few could touch and not be defiled.  Miss Browning had been on the watch for the signs of deterioration in Cynthia’s character ever since her return home.  But, excepting in a greater number of pretty and becoming articles of dress, there was no great change for the worse to be perceived.  Cynthia had been ‘in the world,’ had ’beheld the glare and glitter and dazzling display of London,’ yet had come back to Hollingford as ready as ever to place a chair for Miss Browning, or to gather flowers for a nosegay for Miss Phoebe, or to mend her own clothes.  But all this was set down to the merits of Cynthia, not to the credit of London-town.

‘As far as I can judge of London,’ said Miss Browning, sententiously continuing her tirade against the place, ’it’s no better than a pickpocket and a robber dressed up in the spoils of honest folk.  I should like to know where my Lord Hollingford was bred, and Mr. Roger Hamley.  Your good husband lent me that report of the meeting, Mrs Gibson, where so much was said about them both, and he was as proud of their praises as if he had been akin to them, and Phoebe read it aloud to me, for the print was too small for my eyes; she was a good deal perplexed with all the new names of places, but I said she had better skip them all, for we had never heard of them before and probably should never hear of them again, but she read out the fine things they said of my lord, and Mr. Roger, and I put it to you, where were they born and bred?  Why, within eight miles of Hollingford; it might have been Molly there or me; it’s all a chance; and then they go and talk about the pleasures of intellectual society in London, and the distinguished people up there that it is such an advantage to know, and all the time I know it’s only shops and the play that’s the real attraction.  But that’s neither here nor there.  We all put our best foot foremost, and if we have a reason to give that looks sensible we speak it out like men, and never say anything about the silliness we are hugging to our hearts.  But I ask you again, where does this fine society come from, and these wise men, and these distinguished travellers?  Why, out of country parishes like this!  London picks ’em all up, and decks herself with them, and then calls out loud to the folks she’s robbed, and says, “Come and see how fine I am.”  Fine, indeed!  I’ve no patience with London:  Cynthia is much better out of it; and I’m not sure, if I were you, Mrs. Gibson, if I would not stop up those London letters:  they’ll only be unsettling her.’

‘But perhaps she may live in London some of these days, Miss Browning,’ simpered Mrs. Gibson.