Her welcome had been warm, and she knew that under the rude exterior it was more than warm; but the absence of refinement jarred upon her.  It all seemed so uncouth.  She shrank from the homely rooms; the very voice of her mother, trembling with emotion, shocked her ear, unaccustomed to country pronunciation.  She missed the soft accents of the drawing-room.  From her window she could see nothing but the peaceful fields—­the hateful green trees and hedges, the wheat, and the hateful old hills.  How miserable it was not to be born to Grosvenor Square!

Georgie’s case was, of course, exceptional in so far as her ‘success’ was concerned.  She possessed good natural parts, discretion, and had the advantage of high-class recommendations.  But apart from her ‘success,’ her case was not exceptional.  The same thing is going on in hundreds of farmhouses.  The daughters from the earliest age are brought up under a system of education the practical tendency of which is to train their minds out of the associations of farming.  When later on they go out to teach they are themselves taught by the social surroundings of the households into which they enter to still more dislike the old-fashioned ways of agriculture.  Take twenty farmers’ families, where there are girls, and out of that twenty fifteen will be found to be preparing for a scholastic life.  The farmer’s daughter does not like the shop-counter, and, as she cannot stay at home, there is nothing left to her but the profession of governess.  Once thoroughly imbued with these ‘social’ ideas, and a return to the farm is almost impossible.  The result is a continuous drain of women out of agriculture—­of the very women best fitted in the beginning to be the helpmate of the farmer.  In no other calling is the assistance of the wife so valuable; it is not too much to say that part at least of the decadence of agriculture is owing to the lack of women willing to devote themselves as their mothers did before them.  It follows that by degrees the farming caste is dying out.  The sons go to the city, the daughters go to the city; in a generation, or little more, a once well-known farming family becomes extinct so far as agriculture is concerned.

How could such a girl as poor Georgie, looking out of window at the hateful fields, and all at discord with the peaceful scene, settle down as the mistress of a lonely farmhouse?

CHAPTER XI

FLEECEBOROUGH.  A ‘DESPOT’

An agricultural district, like a little kingdom, has its own capital city.  The district itself is as well defined as if a frontier line had been marked out around it, with sentinels and barriers across the roads, and special tolls and duties.  Yet an ordinary traveller, upon approaching, fails to perceive the difference, and may, perhaps, drive right through the territory without knowing it.  The fields roll on and rise into the hills, the hills sink again into