The evening wore away with no abatement of this soothing politeness; and her spirits were gradually raised to a modest tranquillity.  She did not learn either to forget or defend the past; but she learned to hope that it would never transpire farther, and that it might not cost her Henry’s entire regard.  Her thoughts being still chiefly fixed on what she had with such causeless terror felt and done, nothing could shortly be clearer than that it had been all a voluntary, self-created delusion, each trifling circumstance receiving importance from an imagination resolved on alarm, and everything forced to bend to one purpose by a mind which, before she entered the abbey, had been craving to be frightened.  She remembered with what feelings she had prepared for a knowledge of Northanger.  She saw that the infatuation had been created, the mischief settled, long before her quitting Bath, and it seemed as if the whole might be traced to the influence of that sort of reading which she had there indulged.

Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England, was to be looked for.  Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the south of France might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented.  Catherine dared not doubt beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern and western extremities.  But in the central part of England there was surely some security for the existence even of a wife not beloved, in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age.  Murder was not tolerated, servants were not slaves, and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist.  Among the Alps and Pyrenees, perhaps, there were no mixed characters.  There, such as were not as spotless as an angel might have the dispositions of a fiend.  But in England it was not so; among the English, she believed, in their hearts and habits, there was a general though unequal mixture of good and bad.  Upon this conviction, she would not be surprised if even in Henry and Eleanor Tilney, some slight imperfection might hereafter appear; and upon this conviction she need not fear to acknowledge some actual specks in the character of their father, who, though cleared from the grossly injurious suspicions which she must ever blush to have entertained, she did believe, upon serious consideration, to be not perfectly amiable.