"People nowadays seemed to busy for gaiety, and what was worse, appeared to frown upon innocent enjoyment.  Life was too dreadfully real and earnest these days, thought Mrs. Bailey, and all the young people were middle-aged at twenty. 

If only people would realize that the light hearted…things were not any less significant than the violent and brutish, what a step forward it would be,,. Because a song, a book, a play, a picture, or anything created was gay it did not necessarily follow that it was trivial.  It might be, mused Mrs. Bailey gazing into the moving sunshine with unseeing eyes, a finer thing because it had been fashioned with greater care and artifice; emotion remembered and translated to give pleasure, rather than emotion remembered and evincing only an involuntary and quite hideous howl."    - Miss Read, Thrush Green