Of course, as Oliver was thankful to think, there were many much better representatives of the small shopkeeping class than any he encountered in Friarton—young men whose public spirit and intelligence, if not their culture, far exceeded his own; girls as dutiful as Fan had been to her father, and with a still higher and truer idea of what made perfect womanliness, and of a necessity perfect ladyhood, in any rank. But he feared these formed the exceptions, more or less rare, to the ordinary rule. They were the salt of the earth, no doubt, but bore no greater proportion to the social body they preserved from corruption, than salt to the physical world with which it is incorporated. Oliver was compelled to suspect that the Dadds and Polleys presented an average specimen of their class. Oliver sought to prove a friend and brother to the young Polleys and their girl companions as well as to Jack Dadd and his associates. In order to be so he struggled to show himself patient and judicious with the girls. He answered all their questions about his former college experience and present volunteer movement, as fully as he knew how. And then he tried to carry the inquisitors to something in earth or heaven beyond their small personalities and their life in Friarton, with so poor a result that he fell back in despair to asking ’Liza Polley about the poetry—of which she was said to be fond. She did not impress him as the most intelligent of the sisters, but he fancied if she had the shadow of a taste for poetry, he had a hold upon her. Oliver was in blissful ignorance of Mrs. Polley’s objection to such a subject of conversation, as not merely trifling in the extreme, but verging on impropriety. For that matter, Mrs. Polley was not quite so good as her word where a well-to-do young fellow, who might be looking after one or other of her daughters, was concerned. She gave Oliver considerable license in his attempts to entertain the girls, leaving him to ‘get thick’ with them in his own way, refraining, to a remarkable extent and with some disinterestedness, from her usual custom of engrossing the conversation. She only dropped one little hint which, notwithstanding Fan’s warning, Oliver failed to appropriate. ‘If you encourage ’Liza in her liking for such nonsense, you must be prepared to take the responsibility upon yourself, Mr. Oliver,’ said Mrs. Polley, with something like a simper which might have been alarming in so downright, plain-spoken a woman, had it been addressed to a less single-hearted, self-forgetful man.