She had not much society or recreation at the White House. There were times, indeed, when, if it had been possible for a girl to have done so, Lydia would have had no objection to try, as Harry had done, what the society of the “Red Lion” could do for her; but to do her justice one trial would have been enough. She did what was quite as good, and more innocent; she ran off sometimes into the kitchen of the White House, and talked with the servants, and heard a hundred stories both of the past and present, and learned the countryside, so that she knew who everybody was, and their mothers, and their wives, and all that had happened to them. It was there, rather than from her mother and her sister, that she heard about Harry. The old cook remembered everything about him, from the time when he had cut his teeth. She had a recollection of that night when he had gone away, and still excused herself for not having gone to the rescue. “T’ master was all about t’ house, travelling up and down in his stocking-feet--was it my part to oop and open the door?” Thus her apologies accused her according to the proverb. The other women were younger, but they too had something to tell. And then Liddy would go back to the quietude of the parlour, where her mother was sitting in the same attitude, reading the same book. The parlour looked cheerful enough, but there was never any change in it, not half so much as in the kitchen, where some one was always moving about, and there was a perpetual flow of talk. Liddy never spent an evening away from home, except two or three times a year to her sister’s, when there was “a party” prepared weeks in advance, and talked of for months after; or at Dr. Selby’s in the village, where now and then there were entertainments of a homelier kind.