r whether it
is so or not, and to regulate your behaviour accordingly. I think your
manners to him encouraging. I speak as a friend, Emma. You had better
look about you, and ascertain what you do, and what you mean to do."

"I thank you; but I assure you you are quite mistaken. Mr. Elton and
I are very good friends, and nothing more;" and she walked on, amusing
herself in the consideration of the blunders which often arise from a
partial knowledge of circumstances, of the mistakes which people of high
pretensions to judgment are for ever falling into; and not very well
pleased with her brother for imagining her blind and ignorant, and in
want of counsel. He said no more.

Mr. Woodhouse had so completely made up his mind to the visit, that in
spite of the increasing coldness, he seemed to have no idea of shrinking
from it, and set forward at last most punctually with his eldest
daughter in his own carriage, with less apparent consciousness of the
weather than either of the others; too full of the wonder of his own
going, and the pleasure it was to afford at Randalls to see that it was
cold, and too well wrapt up to feel it. The cold, however, was severe;
and by the time the second carriage was in motion, a few flakes of snow
were finding their way down, and the sky had the appearance of being so
overcharged as to want only a milder air to produce a very white world
in a very short time.

Emma soon saw that her companion was not in the happiest humour. The
preparing and the going abroad in such weather, with the sacrifice of
his children after dinner, were evils, were disagreeables at least,
which Mr. John Knightley did not by any means like; he anticipated
nothing in the visit that could be at all worth the purchase; and the
whole of their drive to the vicarage was spent by him in expressing his
discontent.

"A man," said he, "must have a very good opinion of himself when he asks
people to leave their own fireside, and encounter such a day as
this, for the sake of coming to see him. He must think himself a most
agreeable fellow; I could not do such a thing. It is the greatest
absurdity--Actually snowing at this moment!--The folly of not allowing
people to be comfortable at home--and the folly of people's not staying
comfortably at home when they can! If we were obliged to go out such
an evening as this, by any call of duty or business, what a hardship we
should deem it;--and here are we, probably with rather thinner