breaking of matches; it was the very freedom and shallowness of such gossip that made it wholly unexciting; their mother’s presence put no check on the talk—­she, indeed, was very much like her daughters in choice of subject—­and the young men who frequented the house joined in discussion of sexual entanglements with a disengaged air which, if it impugned their delicacy, at all events seemed to testify to practical innocence.

Those young men!  Dunfield was at that time not perhaps worse off in its supply of marriageable males than other small provincial towns, but, to judge from the extensive assortment which passed through the Cartwrights’ house, the lot of Dunfield maidens might beheld pathetic.  They were not especially ignorant or vulgar, these budding townsmen, simply imbecile.  One could not accuse them of positive faults, for they had no positive qualities, unless it were here and there a leaning to physical fatuity.  Their interests were concerned with the pettiest of local occurrences; their favouritisms and animosities were those of overgrown infants.  They played practical jokes on each other in the open streets; they read the local newspapers to extract the feeblest of gossip; they had a game which they called polities, and which consisted in badging themselves with blue or yellow, according to the choice of their fathers before them; they affected now and then to. haunt bar-parlours and billiard-rooms, and made good resolutions when they had smoked or drunk more than their stomachs would support.  If any Dunfield schoolboy exhibited faculties of a kind uncommon in the town, he was despatched to begin life on a more promising scene; those who remained, who became the new generation of business men, of town councillors, of independent electors, were such as could not by any possibility have made a living elsewhere.  Those elders who knew Dunfield best could not point to a single youth of fair endowments who looked forward to remaining in his native place.

The tone of Dunfield society was not high.

No wonder that Emily Hood had her doubts as to the result of study taken up by one of the Cartwrights.  Still, she held it a duty to give what help she could, knowing how necessary it was that Jessie should, if possible, qualify herself to earn a living.  The first thing after breakfast on Tuesday morning she set forth to visit her friends.  It was not quite ten o’clock when she reached the house, and she looked forward with some assurance of hope to finding the family alone.  Jessie herself opened the door, and Emily; passing at once into the sitting-room, discovered that not only had a visitor arrived before her, but this the very person she would most have desired to avoid.  Mr. Richard Dagworthy was seated in conversation with Mrs. Cartwright and her daughters or rather he had been conversing till Emily’s arrival caused a momentary silence.  He had called thus early, on his way to the mill, to inquire for Mr. Cartwright’s present address having occasion to communicate with him on business matters.