Mr. Sneyd exerted himself to ride out with Lady Bell. Nobody interfered with the men’s performance of these good offices, which formed an agreeable, and a reclaiming element in the worthless tenor of their lives. At first St. Bevis’s was horribly, heavily dull to Lady Bell; for there were no visitors and no visits. The Squire did not bring company to St. Bevis’s; Mrs. Die had long retired from her world. The appeal to the quarter sessions remained for months the solitary episode which broke the dreary monotony of Lady Bell’s life. But the oppression of dulness grew lightened by custom and in time, though not from Lady Bell’s acquiring rapidly country tastes, not even after sloppy mid-winter had given place to the rosy-tipped buds of spring. Nature, though for the most part accessible to all, requires an introduction to her court, and a suit paid to her after the fashion of sovereigns, before she will bestow her rewards. In Lady Bell’s day, rude nature was at a discount; such nature as was sought after, praised, and worshipped, was tricked out, transformed, artificial nature. This was not the nature of the neglected, sodden fields, the waste lands, the hovels of cottages, with their sometimes savagely ignorant and always uncared-for occupants, and the stony, rutted roads, like water-courses, all about St. Bevis’s. Besides, youth when it has been town-bred, and if it have not the instinctive passion for nature, does not, in the order of things—in the fantastic extravagance of its emotions and the lethargy of its weariness—have recourse to the last earthly refuge of well-balanced, wise old age. Lady Bell, as her past life faded like a dream—so that London drawing-rooms, public gardens, royal birthdays, Lord Mayors’ shows, satin and spangles, hautboys and French horns, became the merest far-away visions and echoes—adopted ingenious devices, not unlike those of a prisoner, to employ her energies and help her to spend her days. She not only wrote copies, conned French and read history for Mr. Greenwood, she executed intricate feats of stitching and embroidery, with such materials as she could command, entirely for her own gratification. She had learned a little drawing, principally to enable her to trace patterns for her work, and she now accumulated patterns which would serve her for the “flowering” of ruffles and aprons till she was ninety-nine, if her eyes stood out. The closet where she slept, which was all that she could claim as a privileged place of resort and retirement, was not only the haunt peopled by innumerable girlish fancies, but she exercised her skill within its bounds, preserving her health of body and mind in finding there never-ending objects of interest and amusement.