“I had now the good fortune to be admitted, and found her at her chocolate; she had a dish of it in one hand, and with the other she seemed very busy in sorting a large parcel of guineas, which she divided in two heaps on a table that stood before her. She rose and received me with a great deal of civility and kindness, told me she was sorry for my disappointment on my first calling, but added with a smile that when I had been a little while in town I should learn to lie longer in bed in a morning.” After this the London lady explains to her country visitor the meaning of the term racquet, viz. when the number of company assembled for cards exceeded ten tables; if it were fewer, the entertainment was called a “rout,” and if there were only two tables it was a “drum.” To the bewildered visitor the amusements of London folk seemed very odd, and she adds that she found cheating at cards almost as fashionable as cards themselves. As the stage-coach system developed country people came more to London, and Londoners began to pay periodical visits to watering-places, whither they carried the dissipations of town life. The love of scenery is a taste that has been largely developed within the present century. When people travelled formerly, if it were not for business, it was to comply with fashion and for the excitement of a change, but not to revel in the beauties of Nature. The eighteenth century was full of artificial sentiment. It disliked in women the evidences of health and of a robust constitution of mind. The effect on ordinary women was to make them shallow and affected. They were not taught to think; they were encouraged to believe that appearances counted for everything, reality for nothing. As long as the exterior was pleasing, it mattered not what was beneath. “When a poor young lady is taught to value herself on nothing but her cloaths and to think she’s very fine when well accoutred; when she hears say, that ’tis wisdom enough for her to know how to dress herself, that she may become amiable in his eyes, to whom it appertains to be knowing and learned; who can blame her if she lay out her industry and money on such accomplishments, and sometimes extends it farther than her misinformer desires she should.... “If from our infancy we are nurs’d upon ignorance and vanity; are taught to be proud and petulent, delicate and fantastick, humorous and inconstant, ’tis not strange that the ill-effects of this conduct appears in all the future actions of our lives.... That, therefore, women are unprofitable to most, and a plague and dishonour to some men is not much to be regretted on account of the men, because ’tis the product of their own folly, in denying them the benefits of an ingenuous and liberal education, the most effectual means to direct them into, and secure their progress in the ways of vertue.”[66]