d the links of Tweed water it, and even the streets aren't
ordinary, they have such lovely glimpses. From the East Gate you look up
to the East Law, pine trees, grey walls, green terraces; in the Highgate
you don't go many yards without coming to a _pend_ with a view of blue
distances that takes your breath, just as in Edinburgh when you look
down an alley and see ships tacking for the Baltic.... But I wish I had
known Priorsford as it was in my mother's young days, when the French
prisoners were here. The genteel supper-parties and assemblies must have
been vastly entertaining. It has changed even in my day. I don't want to
repeat the old folks' litany, 'No times like the old times,' but it does
seem to me--or is it only distance lending enchantment?--that the
people I used to know were more human, more interesting; there was less
worship of money, less running after the great ones of the earth,
certainly less vulgarity. We were content with less, and happier."

"But, Mrs. Hope," said Pamela, laying down her cup, "this is most
depressing hearing. I came here to find simplicity."

"You needn't expect to find it in Priorsford. We aren't so provincial as
all that. I just wish Mrs. Duff-Whalley could hear you. Simplicity
indeed! I'm not able to go out much now, but I sit here and watch
people, and I am astonished at the number of restless eyes. So many
people spend their lives striving to keep in the swim. They are
miserable in case anyone gets before them, in case a neighbour's car is
a better make, in case a neighbour's entertainments are more
elaborate.... Two girls came to see me this morning, nice girls, pretty
girls, but even my old eyes could see the powder on their faces and
their touched-up eyes. And their whole talk was of daft-like dances, and
bridge, and absurdities. If they had been my daughters I would have
whipped them for their affected manners. And when I think of their
grandmother! A decent woman was Mirren Somerville. She lived with her
father in that ivy-covered cottage at our gates, and she did sewing for
me before she married Banks. She wasn't young when she married. I
remember she came to ask my advice. 'D'you care for him, Mirren?' I
asked. 'Well, mem, it's no' as if I were a young lassie. I'm forty, and
near bye caring. But he's a dacent man, and it's lonely now ma faither's
awa, an' I'm a guid cook, an' he would aye come in to a clean fireside.'
So she married him and made a good wife to him, and