The Laurel Walk by Mary Louisa Molesworth — Read

There is a commonplace saying that old people love best the springtime of the year, as it brings back the brighter memories of their youth, and to a certain extent the sense of buoyancy which fades with increasing age; while the young, on the other hand, love the autumn with its tender sadness in contrast to their own joyous anticipations. But generalities are, after all, but generalities; there was little in the lives of the three Morion daughters this autumn to induce them to turn with any sentimentality or even sentiment to outside nature in its fall; there was too much real greyness, too much real endurance of daily, hourly depressing circumstances for them to long for anything but change.

"It wouldn't be so bad, it really wouldn't," said Eira, "if it were the spring, but another long, long winter, when we can be so much less out of doors; and to have had the glimpse of a chance of a break in it all only seems to have made it worse. Surely, Frances, without wrong complaining and grumbling, isn't it the case that we are peculiarly unlucky in some ways -- that our lives are, I mean? Now, supposing we had had to work for our living, we should probably have been far happier, don't you think?"