for five
minutes was to understand their surroundings; they were hopelessly
feather-brained, they chattered and gabbled with deafening persistency.
If there was no good in their talk, there could scarcely be said to be
any harm; they lived so completely on the surface of things that they
impressed one as incapable even of a doubtful thought. One reason why
Geraldine was the only one who had yet definitely attracted a male
admirer might lie in the fact that there was no air of femininity about
the girls, nothing whatever to touch the most susceptible imagination; a
parcel of schoolboys would have been as provocative. And this
notwithstanding that they talked incessantly of love-making, of
flirtations, of the making and breaking of matches; it was the very
freedom and shallowness of such gossip that made it wholly unexciting;
their mother's presence put no check on the talk--she, indeed, was very
much like her daughters in choice of subject--and the young men who
frequented the house joined in discussion of sexual entanglements with a
disengaged air which, if it impugned their delicacy, at all events
seemed to testify to practical innocence.

Those young men! Dunfield was at that time not perhaps worse off in its
supply of marriageable males than other small provincial towns, but, to
judge from the extensive assortment which passed through the
Cartwrights' house, the lot of Dunfield maidens might beheld pathetic.
They were not especially ignorant or vulgar, these budding townsmen,
simply imbecile. One could not accuse them of positive faults, for they
had no positive qualities, unless it were here and there a leaning to
physical fatuity. Their interests were concerned with the pettiest of
local occurrences; their favouritisms and animosities were those of
overgrown infants. They played practical jokes on each other in the open
streets; they read the local newspapers to extract the feeblest of
gossip; they had a game which they called polities, and which consisted
in badging themselves with blue or yellow, according to the choice of
their fathers before them; they affected now and then to haunt
bar-parlours and billiard-rooms, and made good resolutions when they had
smoked or drunk more than their stomachs would support. If any Dunfield
schoolboy exhibited faculties of a kind uncommon in the town, he was
despatched to begin life on a more promising scene; those who remained,
who became the new generation of business men,