in need of her; and she shrank from a more thorough exploration of the
place. She found she had fancied necessity coming to her and taking away
her good works, as it were, in a basket; but till Mr. Brandreth appeared
with his scheme, nothing had applied for her help She had always hated
theatricals; they bored her; and yet the Social Union was a good object,
and if this scheme would bring her acquainted in Hatboro' it might be
the stepping-stone to something better, something really or more ideally
useful. She wondered what South Hatboro' was like; she would get Mrs.
Bolton's opinion, which, if severe, would be just. She would ask Mrs.
Bolton about Mrs. Munger, too. She would tell Mrs. Bolton to tell Mr. Peck
to call to dine. Would it be thought patronising to Mr. Peck?

The fire from the Franklin-stove diffused a drowsy comfort through the
room, the rain lashed the window-panes, and the wind shrilled in the gable.
Annie fell off to sleep. When she woke up she heard Mrs. Bolton laying the
table for her one o'clock dinner, and she knew it was half-past twelve,
because Mrs. Bolton always laid the table just half an hour beforehand. She
went out to speak to Mrs. Bolton.

There was no want of distinctness in Mrs. Bolton's opinion, but Annie felt
that there was a want of perspective and proportion in it, arising from the
narrowness of Mrs. Bolton's experience and her ignorance of the world; she
was farm-bred, and she had always lived upon the outskirts of Hatboro',
even when it was a much smaller place than now. But Mrs. Bolton had her
criterions, and she believed in them firmly; in a time when agnosticism
extends among cultivated people to every region of conjecture, the social
convictions of Mrs. Bolton were untainted by misgiving. In the first place,
she despised laziness, and as South Hatboro' was the summer home of open
and avowed disoccupation, of an idleness so entire that it had to seek
refuge from itself in all manner of pastimes, she held its population in