She, who in her grandmother's time had been so keen and alert, seemed to have drifted, in Mrs.Alwynn's society, into a torpid state, from which she made vain attempts to emerge, only to sink the deeper.
When she stood once more, fresh from a fortnight of pleasant intercourse with pleasant people, in the little ornate drawing-room at Slumberleigh, on her return from Atherstone, the remembrance of the dulled, confused state in which she had been living with her aunt returned forcibly to her mind.

The various articles of furniture, the red silk handkerchiefs dabbed behind pendent plates, the musical elephants on the mantle-piece, the imitation Eastern antimacassars, the shocking fate, in the way of nailed and glued pictorial ornamentation, that had overtaken the back of the cottage piano--indeed, all the various objects of luxury and _vertu_ with which Mrs.Alwynn had surrounded herself, seemed to recall to Ruth, as the apparatus of the sick-room recalls the illness to the patient, the stupor into which she had fallen in their company.

With her eyes fixed upon the new brass pig (that was at heart a pen-wiper) which Mrs.
Alwynn had pointed out as a gift of Mabel Thursby, who always brought her back some little "tasty thing from London"-- with her eyes on the brass pig, Ruth resolved that, come what would, she would not allow herself to sink into such a state of mental paralysis again.
To read a book of any description was out of the question in the society of Mrs.Alwynn.But Ruth, with the connivance of Mr.Alwynn, devised a means of eluding her aunt.

At certain hours of the day she was lost regularly, and not to be found.

It was summer, and the world, or at least the neighborhood of Slumberleigh Rectory, which was the same thing, was all before her where to choose.