ot_ to be Agatha, and I am sure I will do
nothing else; and as to Amelia, it is of all parts in the world the
most disgusting to me. I quite detest her. An odious little, pert,
unnatural, impudent girl. I have always protested against comedy, and
this is comedy in its worst form." And so saying, she walked hastily out
of the room, leaving awkward feelings to more than one, but exciting
small compassion in any except Fanny, who had been a quiet auditor of
the whole, and who could not think of her as under the agitations of
_jealousy_ without great pity....

The inattention of the two brothers and the aunt to Julia's
discomposure, and their blindness to its true cause, must be imputed to
the fullness of their own minds. They were totally preoccupied. Tom was
engrossed by the concerns of his theatre, and saw nothing that did not
immediately relate to it. Edmund, between his theatrical and his real
part--between Miss Crawford's claims and his own conduct--between love
and consistency, was equally unobservant: and Mrs. Norris was too busy
in contriving and directing the general little matters of the company,
superintending their various dresses with economical expedients, for
which nobody thanked her, and saving, with delighted integrity,
half-a-crown here and there to the absent Sir Thomas, to have leisure
for watching the behavior, or guarding the happiness, of his daughters.

FRUITLESS REGRETS AND APPLES OF SODOM

From 'Mansfield Park'

These were the circumstances and the hopes which gradually brought their
alleviation to Sir Thomas, deadening his sense of what was lost, and in
part reconciling him to himself; though the anguish arising from the
conviction of his own errors in the education of his daughters was never
to be entirely done away.

Too late he became aware how unfavorable to the character of any young
people must be the totally opposite treatment which Maria and Julia had
been always experiencing at home, where the excessive indulgence and
flattery of their aunt had been continually contrasted with his own
severity. He saw how ill he had judged, in expecting to counteract what
was wrong in Mrs. Norris by its reverse in himself, clearly saw that he
had but increased the evil, by teaching them to repress their spirits
in his presence so as to make their real disposition unknown to him,
and sending them for all their indulgences to a person who had been able
to attach them only by the blindness of her aff