We met on the train. We sat opposite each other. She was reading from a device. I was reading Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. She spoke first in one of the long unexplained halts. She put down her device as I laid down my book. She smiled at me. A good table separated us.

"It's great to see people reading Austen, however suspect her morality."

 "Yes, very suspect. I came to her suddenly a few months ago. I had never read her before."

 "Really?"

 She looked surprised.

 "I never had the desire to. She never meant anything to me, until earlier this year when I got a cheap collection. I then read Sense and Sensibility and was gripped. Totally."

 She looked carefully at me.

 I asked what she was reading.

 “Oh a different kettle of fish altogether. Fifty Shades of Grey.”

A polite silence followed, as if one or other of as had let out a sneaky fart. One surely did not discuss the notorious spanking book with a total stranger.

The train started to move again. She picked up her device and before I knew it we were at Paddington and leaving the train. As we stepped off onto the platform she stood before me and turned and said, "I couldn't get into Austen’s false moralisms – that sense that she denied the moral contradictions of the time."

We walked together towards the platform end.

"Of course, of course I understand. Her sector of society always talked morality yet they were kept alive by abject poverty and exploitation."

"Precisely! Hypocrisy of the highest order."

"Just like today."

"Perhaps. But it was worst back then. I really can't take the early 19th century seriously because of all of their double standards".

"But it's just as bad today. Morals are relative with most people: you put them on and take them off like a winter or summer jacket. Just as in Jane Austen."

"I disagree. I advise you: watch out for her acceptable moral transgressions. Ugh!"

I stopped and turned to her. I thanked her for her moral health warnings and mounted the moving stairs to Starbucks. I wanted a coffee before the journey on another two trains back to Cambridge. We did not say goodbye.

In the coffee shop I returned to my book. I did not want to leave the early 19th century of Bath behind. I was so engrossed that I did not notice her come and sit opposite me in Starbucks. I looked up and there she was.

"Sorry. You kind of niggled me there. Saying that the moral hypocrisy of today is as bad as it was in Austen’s day."

I smiled. She sat.

"I didn’t say that. I said that the morals in Austen day were as compromised as morals today."

"That I find really difficult to accept."

I ordered her a coffee and we fell to discussing morals in our modern days. I argued that there had been no progress, that we were as morally hypocritical today as back then in the days of the 19^th century.

"So you don't believe in progress?"

"I believe in change. Life has changed since Austen’s time: the ending of slavery, for example, and a hundred more changes and improvements – voting and all that kind of democratic furniture. But progress? That we are heading somewhere better? That human beings are getting better? That we are more progressive? No. Now we compromise our morals as many times a day as in Austen’s time."