d considered it at first. She was humble,
and wishing to be forgiven; and Mr. Yates, desirous of being really
received into the family, was disposed to look up to him and be guided.
He was not very solid; but there was a hope of his becoming less
trifling, of his being at least tolerably domestic and quiet; and at any
rate, there was comfort in finding his estate rather more, and his debts
much less, than he had feared, and in being consulted and treated as
the friend best worth attending to. There was comfort also in Tom, who
gradually regained his health, without regaining the thoughtlessness and
selfishness of his previous habits. He was the better for ever for his
illness. He had suffered, and he had learned to think: two advantages
that he had never known before; and the self-reproach arising from the
deplorable event in Wimpole Street, to which he felt himself accessory
by all the dangerous intimacy of his unjustifiable theatre, made an
impression on his mind which, at the age of six-and-twenty, with no want
of sense or good companions, was durable in its happy effects. He became
what he ought to be: useful to his father, steady and quiet, and not
living merely for himself.

Here was comfort indeed! and quite as soon as Sir Thomas could place
dependence on such sources of good, Edmund was contributing to his
father's ease by improvement in the only point in which he had given
him pain before--improvement in his spirits. After wandering about and
sitting under trees with Fanny all the summer evenings, he had so well
talked his mind into submission as to be very tolerably cheerful again.

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 unfavourable 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 the