The spirited animals waddled off down the street very deliberately, and Carrie sat back in the coach and waved her hand till she was out of sight. Though she had not been altogether pleased to leave home, it would certainly be a new and delightful thing to leave London smoke behind her, and drive far out into the wonderful green country. No train had yet snorted through these fair English meadows, and the depth of their tranquillity was like a dreamless sleep. To the heart that has known sorrow—and perhaps more to the heart that has missed joy—the jubilant burgeoning of spring will sometimes bring an intolerable sadness. But in the first blossom and fairness of her youth, with her sunny childhood barely left behind, with hope ahead, these stainless blue skies, and the rich promise of the bursting leafage, filled Carrie’s heart with a sort of ecstasy. She fairly clapped her hands at the hackneyed old sight of a meadow where lambs were gambolling, and called out to the coachman, praying him to stop and let her buy a drink of milk at a cottage door where a cow was being milked. Towards the end of the day these pleasures began to pall a little, and when at last the coach drew up at Lady Mallow’s door Carrie was not sorry to alight. The forty miles that lay between her and London seemed very long in the retrospect, and a sudden chill of home-sickness fell over her spirit as she entered the decorous portals of her aunt’s abode. ‘I wonder why I ever came,’ she thought. ‘Aunt Charlotte will fidget me to death—and I shall be so dull, and I think London is ever so much nicer than the country.’ We must all be familiar with such misgivings, and familiar too with the extraordinary difference which a night’s rest makes in such a case. Carrie rose up next morning with much more rose-coloured views of life. ‘Aunt Charlotte is vastly dull, but how agreeable to be here!—and O how beautiful, how beautiful!’ she said as she gazed out at the new surroundings, smelt the country sweetness, and longed for breakfast. Lady Mallow, indeed, was quite shocked by Carrie’s appetite. ‘You will become stout, my dear,’ she said. ‘’Tis most ungenteel for a young gentlewoman like you to eat so freely!’ Carrie was a little ashamed of herself. ‘You see, madam,’ she explained, ‘I live always with men, and perhaps their example has made me eat as they do. I do not think I shall become very fat, because all my life I have been hungry, and I have not become fat yet, you see.’