Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/146

, or awkwardness becomes. What is passable in youth is detestable in later age. Mr. Martin is now awkward and abrupt; what will he be at Mr. Weston's time of life?'

There is no saying, indeed,' replied Harriet rather solemnly.

But there may be pretty good guessing. He will be a completely gross vulgar farmer, totally inattentive to appearances, and thinking of nothing but profit and loss.'

Will he, indeed? That will be very bad.'

How much his business engrosses him already is very plain from the circumstance of his forgetting to inquire for the book you recommended. He was a great deal too full of the market to think of anything else—which is just as it should be for a thriving man. What has he to do with books? And I have no doubt that he will thrive, and be a very rich man in time; and his being illiterate and coarse need not disturb us.'

I wonder he did not remember the book,' was all Harriet's answer, and spoken with a degree of grave displeasure which Emma thought might be safely left to itself. She therefore said no more for some time. Her next beginning was—

In one respect, perhaps, Mr. Elton's manners are superior to Mr. Knightley's or Mr. Weston's. They have more gentleness. They might be more safely held up as a pattern. There is an openness, a quickness, almost a bluntness in Mr. Weston, which everybody likes in him because there is so much good humour with it—but that would not do to be copied. Neither would Mr. Knightley's downright, decided, commanding sort of manner, though it suits him very well: his