ugh even to attempt a sketch of her
lover's profile, that she might be detected in the
design. There she fell miserably short of the true
heroic height...Not one started with rapturous wonder
on beholding her...nor was she once called a divinity
by anybody."

She had no lover at the age of seventeen,

"because there was not a lord in the neighbourhood--not
even a baronet. There was not one family among their
acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy
accidentally found at their door--not one whose origin
was unknown."

Nor is Catherine aided in her career by those "improbable
events," so dear to romance, that serve to introduce a hero--a
robber's attack, a tempest, or a carriage accident. With a sly
glance at such dangerous characters as Lady Greystock in _The
Children of the Abbey_ (1798), Miss Austen creates the inert, but
good-natured Mrs. Alien as Catherine's chaperone in Bath:

"It is now expedient to give some description of Mrs.
Alien that the reader may be able to judge in what
manner her actions will hereafter tend to promote the
general distress of the work and how she will probably
contribute to reduce poor Catherine to all the
desperate wretchedness of which a last volume is
capable, whether by her imprudence, vulgarity or
jealousy--whether by intercepting her letters, ruining
her character or turning her out of doors."

Amid all the diversions of the gay and beautiful city of Bath,
Miss Austen does not lose sight entirely of her satirical aim,
though she turns aside for a time. Catherine's confusion of mind
is suggested with exquisite art in a single sentence. As she
drives with John Thorpe she "meditates by turns on broken
promises and broken arches, phaetons and false hangings, Tilneys
and trapdoors." This prepares us for the delightful scene in
which Tilney, on the way to the abbey, foretells what Catherine
may expect on her arrival. The hall dimly lighted by the expiring
embers of a wood fire, the deserted bedchamber "never used since
some cousin or kin had died in it about twenty years before," the
single lamp, the tapestry, the funereal bed, the broken lute, the
ponderous chest, the secret door, the vaulted room, the rusty
dagger, the cabinet of ebony and gold with its roll of
manuscripts, prove his intimacy with _The Romance of the Forest_,
as well as with _The Mysteries of Udolpho_. The blac