The Duke of Stockbridge by Edward Bellamy — Read

All through the first half of December one heavy snow storm had followed / another. The roads about Stockbridge were often blocked for days / together. In the village the work of digging paths along the sidewalks, / between the widely-parted houses, was quite too great to be so much as / thought of, and the only way of getting about was in sleighs, or wading / mid-leg deep. Of course, for the women, this meant virtual imprisonment / to the house, save on the occasion of the Sunday drive to meeting. In / these days, even the disciplinary tedium of a convict's imprisonment is / relieved by supplies of reading matter gathered by benevolent societies. / But for the imprisoned women of whom I write there was not even this / recreation. Printing had, indeed, been invented some hundreds of years, / but it can scarcely be said that books had been as yet, and especially / the kinds of books that ladies care to read. A bible, concordance, and / perhaps a commentary, with maybe three or four other grave volumes, / formed the limit of the average library in wealthy Berkshire families of / that day.

It is needless to say then, that Desire's time hung very heavy on her / hands, despite the utmost alleviations which embroidery, piano-playing, / and cakemaking could afford. For her, isolated by social superiority, / and just now, more than ever, separated from intercourse with the lower / classes by reason of the present political animosities, there was / no participation in the sports which made the season lively for the / farmers' daughters. The moonlight sledding and skating expeditions, the / promiscuously packed and uproarious sleighing-parties, the candy-pulls / and "bees" of one sort and another, and all the other robust and not / over-decorous social recreations in which the rural youth and maidens of / that day delighted, were not for the storekeeper's fastidious daughter. / The gentlemen's families in town did, indeed, afford a more refined / and correspondingly duller social circle, but naturally enough in the / present state of politics, there was very little thought of jollity in / that quarter.