and very obscure in its meaning. But Eliza has worn us out with books of reference, and we have become so learned and so full of culture that it is impossible to say where it will all end. My own library has been ransacked for books—I think it is the fact of my having a library that has made our house a sort of centre for the Reading Society. We criticize freely all contemporary literature, and base our preference for any book upon its "vigorous Saxon style." 

 Eliza has written two reviews for the local newspaper, pointing out some mistakes in grammar in one of the greatest novels of the day, and this naturally makes us feel very proud of Eliza. Those of us who plead for an easy flowing style consider that she has an almost hypersensitive ear for errors in the use of the English accidence. A split infinitive has heretofore hardly arrested our attention; now we shudder at its use: while the misuse of the word to "aggravate," which up to the present we believed in all simplicity to mean to "annoy," causes the gravest offence when employed in the wrong sense. Books from the circulating library have been known to be treated almost like proof-sheets, and corrections are jotted down in pencil on the margin of the leaves. Even the notes which ladies send to each other are subject to revision at the hands of the recipient.  Ordinary conversation is now hardly known in Stowel, and tea-parties take the form of discussions. The spring weather is so warm that I generally have my long chair taken on to the lawn in the afternoons, and tea is sometimes brought out there when the meetings of the Reading Society are over. But tea, and even pound-cake, are thrown away upon young ladies who partake of it absently, and to whom all things material and mundane—these words are often used—must now be offered with a feeling of apology. 

 Major Jacobs rode over to see me this afternoon, and we had not long enjoyed the repose of deckchairs and cigarettes under the medlar-tree, and the songs of birds which have begun nesting very early this year, and the quiet rumbling of heavy wagons that pass sometimes in the highroad beyond the garden, when the Reading Society in a body joined us from the house, and I heard my sister give directions for tea to be brought out on to the lawn. The other day I heard Palestrina tell a friend of hers that she nearly always contrived to have some one to tea, or to sit with Hugo in the afternoon, and my sister's satisfaction increases in direct proportion to the number of people who come. 

 We had hardly finished tea when Frances Taylor said suddenly, yet with the manner of one who has risen 

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