Eleanor’s outlook on life did not improve as the afternoon wore on. The pageboy had brought from the library By Mere and Wold instead of By Mere Chance , the book which everyone denied having read. The unwelcome substitute appeared to be a collection of nature notes contributed by the author to the pages of some Northern weekly, and when one had been prepared to plunge with disapproving mind into a regrettable chronicle of ill-spent lives it was intensely irritating to read “the dainty yellowhammers are now with us and flaunt their jaundiced livery from every bush and hillock.” Besides, the thing was so obviously untrue; either there must be hardly any bushes or hillocks in those parts or the country must be fearfully overstocked with yellowhammers. The thing scarcely seemed worth telling such a lie about. And the pageboy stood there, with his sleekly brushed and parted hair, and his air of chaste and callous indifference to the desires and passions of the world. Eleanor hated boys, and she would have liked to have whipped this one long and often. It was perhaps the yearning of a woman who had no children of her own.