It was such a very lovely night, that Mrs Morgan was tempted to go
further than she intended. She called on two or three of her
favourites in Grove Street, and was almost as friendly with them as
Lucy Wodehouse was with the people in Prickett's Lane; but being
neither pretty and young, like Lucy, nor yet a mother with a nursery,
qualified to talk about the measles, her reception was not quite as
enthusiastic as it might have been. Somehow it would appear as though
our poor neighbours loved most the ministrations of youth, which is
superior to all ranks in the matter of possibility and expectation,
and inferior to all ranks in the matter of experience; and so holds a
kind of balance and poise of nature between the small and the great.
Mrs Morgan was vaguely sensible of her disadvantages in this respect
as well as in others. She never could help imagining what she might
have been had she married ten years before at the natural period.
"And even then not a girl," she said to herself in her sensible way,
as she carried this habitual thread of thought with her along the
street, past the little front gardens, where there were so many
mothers with their children. On the other side of the way the genteel
houses frowned darkly with their staircase windows upon the humility
of Grove Street; and Mrs Morgan began to think within herself of the
Miss Hemmings and other spinsters, and how they got along upon this
path of life, which, after all, is never lightsome to behold, except
in the future or the past. It was dead present with the Rector's wife
just then, and many speculations were in her mind, as was natural.
"Not that I could not have lived unmarried," she continued within
herself, with a woman's pride; "but things looked so different at
five-and-twenty!" and in her heart she grudged the cares she had lost,
and sighed over this wasting of her years.