r son was
living--to come to a place like Slumberleigh."

"It _is_ a great change. I am ashamed to say how much I felt it at
first. I don't know how to express it; but everything down here seems so
small and local, and hard and fast."

"I know," said Charles, gently; and they walked on in silence. "And
yet," he said at last, "it seems to me, and I should have thought you
would have felt the same, that life is very small, very narrow and
circumscribed everywhere; though perhaps more obviously so in Cranfords
and Slumberleighs. I have seen a good deal during the last fifteen
years. I have mixed with many sorts and conditions of men, but in no
class or grade of society have I yet found independent men and women.
The groove is as narrow in one class as in another, though in some it is
better concealed. I sometimes feel as if I were walking in a ball-room
full of people all dancing the lancers. There are different sets, of
course--fashionable, political, artistic--but the people in them are all
crossing over, all advancing and retiring, with the same apparent
aimlessness, or setting to partners."

"There is occasionally an aim in that."

Charles smiled grimly.

"They follow the music in that as in everything else. You go away for
ten years, and still find them, on your return, going through the same
figures to new tunes. I wonder if there are any people anywhere in the
world who stand on their own feet, and think and act for themselves; who
don't set their watches by other people's; who don't live and marry and
die by rote, expecting to go straight up to heaven by rote afterwards?"

"I believe there are such people," said Ruth, earnestly; "I have had
glimpses of them, but the real ones look like the shadows, and the
shadows like the real ones, and--we miss them in the crowd."

"Or one thinks one finds them, and they turn out only clever imitations
after all. In these days there is a mania for shamming originality of
some kind. I am always imagining people I meet are real, and not
shadows, until one day I unintentionally put my hand through them, and
find out my mistake. I am getting tired of being taken in."

"And some day you will get tired of being cynical."

"I am very much obliged to you for your hopeful view of my future. You
evidently imagine that I have gone in for the fashionable creed of the
young man of the present day. I am not young enough to take pleasure in
high collars and cheap cynicism, Miss Deynco