No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine.

And what are you reading, Miss—?" "Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady…in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance.

Isabella, embracing Catherine, thus began: - "Yes, my dear Catherine, it is so indeed; your penetration has not deceived you. - Oh! that arch eye of yours! - It sees through every thing."

Catherine replied only by a look of wondering ignorance.

But neither the business alleged, nor the magnificent compliment, could win Catherine from thinking that some very different object must occasion so serious a delay of proper repose…something was to be done which could be done only while the household slept; and the probability that Mrs. Tilney yet lived, shut up for causes unknown, and receiving from the pitiless hands of her husband a nightly supply of coarse food, was the conclusion which necessarily followed.

Her thoughts being still chiefly fixed on what she had with such causeless terror felt and done, nothing could shortly be clearer than that it had been all a voluntary, self-created delusion…Among the Alps and Pyrenees, perhaps, there were no mixed characters…[but] among the English, she believed, in their hearts and habits, there was a general though unequal mixture of good and bad.