“It can be but for a fortnight,” said Harry, “and if a fortnight can kill her she must have a constitution which nothing could save!  No, I will not do her any harm.  I only want her to look kindly on me, to give me smiles as well as blushes, to keep a chair for me by herself wherever we are, and be all animation when I take it and talk to her; to think as I think, to be interested in all my possessions and pleasures, try to keep me longer at Mansfield, and feel when I go away that she shall never be happy again.  I want nothing more.”

“Moderation itself!” replied Mary.  “I can have no scruples now.  Well, you will have opportunities enough of endeavouring to recommend yourself, for we are a great deal together.”

Harry was unable to make any impression on Fanny; and though he fell deeply in love with her, got her brother William made lieutenant, and, after a ball given in her honour by Sir Thomas, proposed to her, he was unable to win her favour.  She was in love with Edmund; and Edmund was torn between love for Mary, despair of winning her, and disapproval of her principles.

IV.—­Wedding Bells at Mansfield

Mr. William Price, second lieutenant of H.M.S.  Thrush, having obtained a ten days’ leave of absence, again went down to see his sister; and Sir Thomas, as a kind of medicinal project on his niece’s understanding, just to enable her to contrast with her father’s shabby dwelling an abode of wealth and plenty like Mansfield Park, arranged that she should accompany her brother back to Portsmouth, and spend a little time with her own family.  Within four days from their arrival William had to sail; and Fanny could not conceal it from herself that the home he had left her in was, in almost every respect, the very reverse of what she could have wished.  It was the abode of noise, disorder and impropriety.  Nobody was in his right place; nothing was done as it ought to be.  She could not respect her parents as she had hoped.  Her father was more negligent of his family, worse in his habits, coarser in his manners, than she had been prepared for.  He did not want abilities; but he had no curiosity, and no information beyond his profession.  He read only the newspaper and the Navy List.  He talked only of the dockyard, the harbour, Spithead, and the Motherbank.  He swore and he drank; he was dirty and gross.

She had never been able to recall anything approaching to tenderness in his former treatment of herself.  There had remained only a general impression of roughness, and now he scarcely ever noticed her but to make her the object of a coarse joke.

Her disappointment in her mother was greater.  There she had hoped much, and found almost nothing.  She discovered, indeed, that her mother was a partial, ill-judging parent, a dawdle, a slattern, who neither taught nor restrained her children, whose house was the scene of mismanagement and discomfort from beginning to end, and who had no talent, no conversation, no affection towards herself; no curiosity to know her better, no desire of her friendship, and no inclination for her company that could lessen her sense of such knowledge.