as with them into this. But Sarah did not wish to be
old-fashioned. She sympathized with the social movements of the day; she
believed in inventions and progress; she went to school and studied a
great deal which her parents never heard of, and which she very promptly
forgot. When she grew up she wore the widest hoop-skirts; she was one of
the first to use an electric spinning-wheel; and when she took charge
of her father's house, she it was who banished to the garret the
old-fashioned sewing-machine, and the bicycles on which some of the
older members of the family once used to ride. She tried to persuade her
father to use a hot-air plough, and to give up the practice of
keeping cows in an age when milk and butter were considered not only
unnecessary, but injurious to human health. When she married Samuel
Block, then a man of forty-five, she really thought she did so because
he was a person of progressive ideas, but the truth was she married him
because he loved her, and because he did it in an honest, old-fashioned
way.

In her inner soul Sarah was just as old-fashioned as anybody--she had
been born so, and she had never changed. Endeavor as she might to make
herself believe that she was a woman of modern thought and feeling, her
soul was truly in sympathy with the social fashions and customs in which
she had been brought up; and those to which she was trying to educate
herself were on the outside of her, never a part of her, but always
the objects of her aspirations. These aspirations she believed to be
principles. She tried to set her mind upon the unfolding revelations
of the era, as young women in her grandfather's day used to try to set
their minds upon Browning. When Sarah told Mr. Clewe that she was going
on the Dipsey because she would not let her husband go by himself, she
did so because she was ashamed to say that she was in such sympathy with
the great scientific movements of the day that she thought it was her
duty to associate herself with one of them; but while she thought she
was lying in the line of high principle, she was in fact expressing the
truthful affection of her old-fashioned nature--a nature she was always
endeavoring to keep out of sight, but which from its dark corner ruled
her life.

She had an old-fashioned temper, which delighted in censoriousness.
The more interest she took in anything, the more alive was she to its
defects. She tried to be a good member of her church, but she said sha