The young people were all at home, and sustained their share in the introduction very well, with much good humour and little embarrassment.  They were a remarkably fine family; the sons, Tom and Edmund, boys of seventeen and sixteen, very well looking; the daughters, Maria, aged thirteen, and Julia, twelve, decidedly handsome.

But it took a long time to reconcile Fanny to the novelty of Mansfield Park, and to the separation from everybody she had been used to.  Nobody meant to be unkind, but nobody put himself out of the way to secure her comfort.  She was disheartened by Lady Bertram’s silence, awed by Sir Thomas’s grave looks, and quite overcome by Mrs. Norris’s admonitions.  Her elder cousins mortified her by reflections on her size, and abashed her by noticing her shyness; Miss Lee, the governess, wondered at her ignorance; and the maidservants sneered at her clothes.  It was not till Edmund found her crying one morning on the attic stairs, and comforted her, that things began to mend for her.  He was ever afterwards her true friend, and next to her dear brother William, first in her affections; and from that day she grew more comfortable.

II.—­Cupid at Mansfield Park

The first event of any importance in the family’s affairs was the death of Mr. Norris, which happened when Fanny was about fifteen, and necessarily introduced alterations and novelties.  Mrs. Norris, on quitting the parsonage, removed first to the Park, and then arranged to take a small dwelling in the village belonging to Sir Thomas and called the White House.  The living had been destined for Edmund, and in ordinary circumstances would have been duly given to some friend to hold till he were old enough to take orders.  But Tom’s extravagances had been so great as to render a different disposal of the next presentation necessary, and so the reversion was sold to a Dr. Grant, a hearty man of forty-five, fond of good eating, married to a wife about fifteen years his junior, and unprovided with children.

The Grants had scarcely been settled in Mansfield a year, when, for the better settlement of his property in the West Indies, Sir Thomas had found it expedient to go to Antigua, and he took his elder son with him, in the hope of detaching him from some bad connections at home.  Neither person was missed.

Lady Bertram did not at all like to have her husband leave her; but she was not disturbed by any alarm for his safety or solicitude for his comfort, being one of those persons who think nothing can be dangerous or difficult or fatiguing to anybody but themselves.  Before very long she found that Edmund could quite sufficiently supply his father’s place.  On this occasion the Miss Bertrams, who were now fully established among the belles of the neighbourhood, were much to be pitied, not for their sorrow, but for their want of it.  Their father was no object of love to them; he had never seemed the friend of their pleasures, and his absence was unhappily most welcome.