But if you are sufficiently intimate to enter into the inner life of the place it will soon be apparent that they either are or wish to appear up to the 'ways of the world.' They read the so-called social journals, and absorb the gossip, tittle-tattle, and personalities--absorb it because they have no means of comparison or of checking the impression it produces of the general loose tone of society.

They know all about it, much more than you do.

No turn of the latest divorce case or great social exposure has escaped them, and the light, careless way in which it is the fashion nowadays to talk openly of such things, as if they were got up like a novel--only with living characters--for amusement, has penetrated into this distant circle.

But then they have been to half the leading watering-places--from Brighton to Scarborough; as for London, it is an open book to them; the railways have long dissipated the pleasing mysteries that once hung over the metropolis.
Talk of this sort is, of course, only talk; still it is not a satisfactory sign of the times.

If the country girl is no longer the hoyden that swung on the gates and romped in the hay, neither has she the innocent thought of the olden days.
At the same time our friends are greatly devoted to the Church--old people used to attend on Sundays as a sacred and time honoured duty, but the girls leave them far behind, for they drive up in a pony carriage to the distant church at least twice a week besides.