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I am particularly fond of it."
"I am glad of it; I will drive you out in mine every day."
"Thank you," said Catherine, in some distress, from a doubt of the
propriety of accepting such an offer.
"I will drive you up Lansdown Hill tomorrow."
"Thank you; but will not your horse want rest?"
"Rest! He has only come three and twenty miles today; all nonsense;
nothing ruins horses so much as rest; nothing knocks them up so
soon. No, no; I shall exercise mine at the average of four hours
every day while I am here."
"Shall you indeed!" said Catherine very seriously. "That will be
forty miles a day."
"Forty! Aye, fifty, for what I care. Well, I will drive you up
Lansdown tomorrow; mind, I am engaged."
"How delightful that will be!" cried Isabella, turning round. "My
dearest Catherine, I quite envy you; but I am afraid, brother, you
will not have room for a third."
"A third indeed! No, no; I did not come to Bath to drive my sisters
about; that would be a good joke, faith! Morland must take care
of you."
This brought on a dialogue of civilities between the other two;
but Catherine heard neither the particulars nor the result. Her
companion's discourse now sunk from its hitherto animated pitch to
nothing more than a short decisive sentence of praise or condemnation
on the face of every woman they met; and Catherine, after listening
and agreeing as long as she could, with all the civility and deference
of the youthful female mind, fearful of hazarding an opinion of its
own in opposition to that of a self-assured man, especially where
the beauty of her own sex is concerned, ventured at length to vary
the subject by a question which had been long uppermost in her
thoughts; it was, "Have you ever read Udolpho, Mr. Thorpe?"
"Udolpho! Oh, Lord! Not I; I never read novels; I have something
else to do."
Catherine, humbled and ashamed, was going to apologize for her
question, but he prevented her by saying, "Novels are all so full
of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one
come out since Tom Jones, except The Monk; I read that t'other day;
but as for all the others, they are the stupidest things in creation."
"I think you must like Udolpho, if you were to read it; it is so
very interesting."
"Not I, faith! No, if I read any, it shall be Mrs. Radcliffe's;
her novels are amusing enough; they are worth reading; some fun
and nature in them."
"Udolpho was written by Mrs. Radcliffe," said Catherine, with some
hesitation, from the fear of mortifying him.
"No sure; was it? Aye, I remember, so it was; I was thinking of
that other stupid book, written by that woman they make such a fuss
about, she who married the French emigrant."
"I suppose you mean Camilla?"
"Yes, that's the book; such unnatural stuff! An old man playing
at see-saw, I took up the first volume once and looked it over, but
I soon found it would not do; indeed I guessed what sort of stuff
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