these ten years at least--and as for the body! Upon
my soul, you might shake it to pieces yourself with a touch. It is the
most devilish little rickety business I ever beheld! Thank God! we
have got a better. I would not be bound to go two miles in it for fifty
thousand pounds."

"Good heavens!" cried Catherine, quite frightened. "Then pray let us
turn back; they will certainly meet with an accident if we go on. Do let
us turn back, Mr. Thorpe; stop and speak to my brother, and tell him how
very unsafe it is."

"Unsafe! Oh, lord! What is there in that? They will only get a roll if
it does break down; and there is plenty of dirt; it will be excellent
falling. Oh, curse it! The carriage is safe enough, if a man knows how
to drive it; a thing of that sort in good hands will last above twenty
years after it is fairly worn out. Lord bless you! I would undertake for
five pounds to drive it to York and back again, without losing a nail."

Catherine listened with astonishment; she knew not how to reconcile two
such very different accounts of the same thing; for she had not been
brought up to understand the propensities of a rattle, nor to know to
how many idle assertions and impudent falsehoods the excess of vanity
will lead. Her own family were plain, matter-of-fact people who seldom
aimed at wit of any kind; her father, at the utmost, being contented
with a pun, and her mother with a proverb; they were not in the habit
therefore of telling lies to increase their importance, or of asserting
at one moment what they would contradict the next. She reflected on the
affair for some time in much perplexity, and was more than once on the
point of requesting from Mr. Thorpe a clearer insight into his real
opinion on the subject; but she checked herself, because it appeared to
her that he did not excel in giving those clearer insights, in making
those things plain which he had before made ambiguous; and, joining to
this, the consideration that he would not really suffer his sister and
his friend to be exposed to a danger from which he might easily preserve
them, she concluded at last that he must know the carriage to be in fact
perfectly safe, and therefore would alarm herself no longer. By him
the whole matter seemed entirely forgotten; and all the rest of his
conversation, or rather talk, began and ended with himself and his own
concerns. He told her of horses which he had bought for a trifle and
sold for incredible sums; of racing