degree. But I must tell you in an
orderly way what has happened to us. I have put off entering upon the
grand subject, partly from the pleasure of keeping one's best news for
the last, and partly from shyness in beginning to describe what it is
impossible that you should enter into. I am well aware of your powers
of imagination and sympathy: but you have not lived five years within
five miles of a country village; and you can no more understand our
present condition than we can appreciate your sherbet and your
mountain summer-house.

"There are two ladies here from Birmingham, so far beyond any ladies
that we have to boast of, that some of us begin to suspect that
Deerbrook is not the Athens and Arcadia united that we have been
accustomed to believe it. You can have no idea how our vanity is
mortified, and our pride abased, by finding what the world can produce
out of the bounds of Deerbrook. We bear our humiliation wonderfully,
however. Our Verdon woods echo with laughter; and singing is heard
beside the brook. The voices of children, grown and ungrown, go up
from all the meadows around; and wit and wisdom are wafted over the
surface of our river at eventide. The truth is, these girls have
brought in a new life among us, and there is not one of us, except the
children, that is not some years younger for their presence. Mr Grey
deserts his business for them, like a school-boy; and Mr Rowland
watches his opportunity to play truant in turn. Mrs Enderby gives
dances, and looks quite disposed to lead off in person. Mrs
Plumstead has grown quite giddy about sorting the letters, and her
voice has not been heard further than three doors off since the
arrival of the strangers. Dr Levitt is preaching his old sermons.
Mrs Grey is well-nigh intoxicated with being the hostess of these
ladies, and has even reached the point of allowing her drawing-room to
be used every afternoon. Enderby is a fixture while they are so.
Neither mother, sister, friend, nor frolic, ever detained him here
before for a month together. He was going away in a fortnight when
these ladies came: they have been here six weeks, and Enderby has
dropped all mention of the external world. If you ask, as you are at
this moment doing in your own heart, how I stand under this influence,
I really cannot tell you. I avoid inquiring too closely. I enjoy
every passing day too much t