deal too light. He is a very great admirer of Tom
Jones, and therefore wears the same coloured
clothes, I imagine, which _he_ did when he was
wounded.

A few days later she is writing again:--

Our party to Ashe to-morrow night will consist of
Edward Cooper, James (for a ball is nothing
without _him_), Buller, who is now staying with
us, and I. I look forward with great impatience to
it, as I rather expect to receive an offer from my
friend in the course of the evening. I shall
refuse him, however, unless he promises to give
away his white coat.

_Friday._--At length the day is come on which I am
to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you
receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I
write at the melancholy idea.

Truly the 'prim' little girl of twelve had made considerable progress by
the time she was twenty! Unfortunately, there is no further letter to
tell us whether Tom made the expected proposal or not; but it is pretty
certain that he did not, and indeed there is a good deal of doubt
whether it was really expected. Possibly lack of means prevented its
ever being a serious matter on his side. They can never have met again
on the same intimate terms. If he visited Ashe at all in 1798, the
conditions must have been different, for he was by that time tacitly
engaged to the lady whom he married in March 1799. Tom Lefroy
accordingly disappears from Jane's life, though he never forgot her till
his death at the age of ninety. When he was an old man he told a young
relation that 'he had been in love with Jane Austen, but it was a boy's
love.'

As for Jane's feelings, the opinion in the family seems to have been
that it was a disappointment, but not a severe one. Had it been severe,
either Jane would not have joked about it, or Cassandra would have
destroyed the letters.

But the day of Jane's one real romance was still to come: a romance
which probably affected the flow of her spirits, and helped to
disincline her for literary composition, for some time after its
occurrence. In this case, as in the other, the author of the _Memoir_
was rather reticent; but shortly after its publication his sister,
Caroline Austen, was induced to put down in writing the facts as she
knew them. No one could be better qualified to do this, for she was a
person of gre