"Where does Mrs. Hampden think of spending the summer, this year?"

I could vouch no information on this point, as, I had not troubled to
put the question to my step-mother myself, and so, after relating to
me in a somewhat confidential tone, all the plans and projects which
her Mama and her Aunt Ada had arranged for their holiday season, and
their strong temptation to try Riviere du Loup, where so many
fashionable people were said to be retiring just then, she finally
arose, and with an emphasized request that I would "run in" without
the least ceremony, to see her at any time, she bowed herself most
gracefully out of the room, followed by her younger and less
sophisticated relative.

I need hardly say what turn the rising tide of my impressions and
opinions took about this time. To one who had passed from the
cheerless, loveless guardianship of a worldly step-mother, into the
tender hands of patient and devoted sisters, to become, instead of a
wandering, uncared for waif, the object of the truest and holiest
solicitude that ever animated Christian hearts, this hollow mockery of
fashionable life was nothing more than a matchless absurdity.

Had I grown up to this, in the unpropitious atmosphere of my own home,
I daresay such phases of existence would have come upon me quite
naturally, and without my ever stopping to question their real or
relative solidity. But the "twig" had been differently inclined, by
hands more worthy of training tender, susceptible off-shoots. Where
can frail young innocence find a safe, secure and profitable refuge,
from the destroying influence of evil, if not within convent walls? It
is there, or nowhere, that girlhood, growing, aspiring girlhood,