But although, until that time, not only out of the main stream of ideas but unaware of its existence, before the decade was ended the Candleford Greenites had a Yellow Book of their own in the form of the all-conquering weekly periodical called Answers. Already its green counterpart, Tit-Bits, was taken by almost every family, and the snippets of information culled from its pages were taken very seriously indeed. Apparently it gave deep satisfaction to the majority of the younger people to know how many years of an average life were spent in bed and how many months of his life a man spent shaving and a woman doing her hair. “If all the sausages eaten at breakfast in this country on one Sunday morning were stretched out singly, end to end, how many miles do you suppose they would reach?” one neighbour, newly primed, would ask another. Or, in lighter mood, “What did the cyclist say to the farmer whose cockerel he had run over?” and, only too often, the answer came pat, for the neighbour had just read his copy of Tit-Bits. The title of Tit-Bits furnished a catchword which could always be used with effect when an unfamiliar taste was discovered or an unfamiliar opinion expressed. Then “Don’t try to be funny. We’ve read about you in Tit-Bits!” said scathingly was, in the slang of the day, “absolutely the last word.”

The girls Laura saw most of at that time were tradesmen’s daughters, living at home, employed only in keeping their fathers’ business books or in helping their mothers with the lighter housework. These were known as the “home birds;” others belonging to the same families were away from home, earning their own living as shop assistants in one of the big London stores, or as school-teachers or nursery governesses. One was in training as a nursing probationer in a London hospital and another was book-keeper and receptionist at a boarding-house. Tradesmen’s daughters no longer went into domestic service, unless one, after an apprenticeship to dressmaking and a second apprenticeship to hairdressing, became a lady’s maid. Nor did they associate much with the domestic staffs in the big houses, and this not because of snobbishness, but because their lives and interests ran along different lines. The village social system in which the first footman is paired off with the grocer’s daughter and the second footman with the post office girl as a matter of etiquette belongs to the world of fiction.