folk as old-fashioned as if they had lived in the past century, and
had brought their old-fashioned ideas 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