Oliver had already made more than one private note to study at leisure the amount of sickliness among the girls of his class in Friarton. He was reluctant to ascribe any proportion of it worth mentioning to those Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun illnesses which Mrs. Polley attributed unhesitatingly to the sufferers having ‘tucked into’ stuffed goose and plum pudding, ducklings and pancakes, the first pickled walnuts, sliced cucumbers and greengage tarts, according to the season. ‘Girls—and boys too for that matter—will take their treats without any thought of the consequences,’ she said, referring to the mode in which dissenters still emulate good church people in keeping those festivals which their chapel ignores otherwise. But Oliver preferred to believe the unsatisfactory bill of health was the result of a wilful and wonderful ignorance of God’s laws of physical life in such elementary obligations as have to do with fresh air, regular exercise, scrupulous cleanliness, enough and suitable clothing, not too much food, together with a sustaining interest and object in existence—even that subject to the injunction to be temperate in all things. The evil effects of these neglected and outraged laws must be intensified in the case of girls, whose indolent and self-indulgent practices alternating with spasmodic exertions in any occupation they could not possibly avoid or really cared about, and in the pursuit of such pleasure as came in their way, exposed them to grave harm, which men, by their established tasks and better balanced habits, avoided. The aimlessness, with a single signal reservation, of these girls’ lives tended also to mental vacuity and its train of disorders. There was only one disadvantage from which the average tradesmen’s daughters of Friarton were happily exempted: that was the unsatisfied craving, the wearing away and eating into itself, of such a nature as Catherine Hilliard’s, over-stimulated and cultivated to the utmost, but finding no essentially human food for its support, or field for its exercise. Oliver could not blame Fan, though he could have wished her less grave and absorbed in her philanthropy. At the same time he was sensible that everybody, except Celia Reid, whom Fan was waiting upon, looked askance at her present benevolence as at her previous diligence. ‘It ain’t natural in a girl to come out for a day’s pleasure and shelve herself at a moment’s notice, that she may nurse the first person as has a headache or is sickified. She might have left that to one of the older people. It is just like Fan Constable with her airs. We ain’t good enough for her to enjoy herself with us, but she will play the Good Samaritan for our benefit—set her up! Celia Reid is a mean-spirited thing to give in and allow it. Could not she have stopped at home rather than afford Miss Fan a back-door to get out of, that she might not feel obliged to be free and pleasant like the other girls?’