In their talks over the Stone Parlour fire she and Wharton had gone through most of the properties, large and small, of his division, and indeed of the divisions round, by the help of the knowledge he had gained in his canvass, together with a blue-book--one of the numberless!--recently issued, on the state of the midland labourer.

He had abounded in anecdote, sarcasm, reflection, based partly on his own experiences, partly on his endless talks with the working-folk, now in the public-house, now at their own chimney-corner.
Marcella, indeed, had a large unsuspected acquaintance with the county before she met it in the flesh.

She knew that a great many of these men who came and spoke to her were doing their best according to their lights, that improvements were going on, that times were mending.

But there were abuses enough still, and the abuses were far more vividly present to her than the improvements.

In general, the people who thronged these splendid rooms were to her merely the incompetent members of a useless class.