ing or doing it. Her whole life
was a feeble imitation of the imitative lives of others; in short, it
was the life of the ordinary country gentlewoman, who lives on her
husband's property, and who, as Augustus Hare says, "has never looked
over the garden-wall."

We do not mean to insinuate for a moment that the utmost energy and
culture are not occasionally to be met with in the female portion of
that interesting mass of our fellow-creatures who swell the large
volumes of the "Landed Gentry." Among their ranks are those who come
boldly forward into the full glare of public life; and, conscious of a
genius for enterprise, to which an unmarried condition perhaps affords
ampler scope, and which a local paper is ready to immortalize, become
secretaries of ladies' societies, patronesses of flower shows, breeders
of choice poultry, or even associates of floral leagues of the highest
political importance. That such women should and do exist among us, the
conscious salt-cellars of otherwise flavorless communities, is a fact
for which we cannot be too thankful; and if Mrs. Thursby was not one of
these aspiring spirits, with a yearning after "the mystical better
things," which one of the above pursuits alone can adequately satisfy,
it was her misfortune and not her fault.

It was her nature, as we have said, servilely to copy others. Her
conversation was all that she could remember of what she had heard from
others, her present dinner-party, as regards food, was a cross between
the two last dinner-parties she had been to. The dessert, however,
conspicuous by its absence, conformed strictly to a type which she had
seen in a London house in June.

Her dinner-party gave her complete satisfaction, which was fortunate,
for to the greater number of the eighteen or twenty people who had been
indiscriminately herded together to form it, it was (with the exception
of Mrs. Alwynn) a dreary or at best an uninteresting ordeal; while to
four people among the number, the four who had met last on the church
steps, it was a period of slow torture, endured with varying degrees of
patience by each, from the two soups in the beginning, to the peaches
and grapes at the long-delayed and bitter end.

Ruth, whose self-possession never wholly deserted her, had reached a
depth of exhausted stupor, in which the mind is perfectly oblivious of
the impression it is producing on others. By an unceasing effort she
listened and answered and smiled at interv