Sublime

Mrs. Thorpe was a widow, and not a very rich one; she was a good-humoured, well-meaning woman, and a very indulgent mother. Her eldest daughter had great personal beauty, and the younger ones, by pretending to be as handsome as their sister, imitating her air, and dressing in the same style, did very well.

But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way. Mr. Allen, who owned the chief53 of the property about Fullerton, the village in Wiltshire where the Morlands lived,54 was ordered to Bath for the benefit of a gouty constitution;55—

To compose a letter which might at once do justice to her sentiments and her situation, convey gratitude without servile regret, be guarded without coldness, and honest without resentment—a letter which Eleanor might not be pained by the perusal of—and, above all, which she might not blush herself, if Henry should chance to see, was an undertaking

Miss Morland is not used to your odd ways.” “I shall be most happy to make her better acquainted with them.” “No doubt;—but that is no explanation of the present.”