Indeed I do not, madam, said Glanville, peevishly.
Well, then I'll tell you, said Arabella; but, pausing a little:
The recital I have engaged myself to make, added she, will necessarily take up some hours' time, as upon reflection I have found: so if you will dispense with my beginning it at present, I will satisfy your curiosity to-morrow, when I may be able to pursue it without interruption.
To this Mr. Glanville made no other answer than a bow with his head; and the coach a few moments after arriving at their own house, he led her to her apartment, firmly resolved never to attend her to any more public places while she continued in the same ridiculous folly.
Sir Charles, who had several times been in doubt whether Arabella was not really disordered in her senses; upon Miss Glanville's account of her behaviour at the gardens, concluded she was absolutely mad, and held a short debate with himself, whether he ought not to bring a commission of lunacy against her, rather than marry her to his son, whom he was persuaded could never be happy with a wife so unaccountably absurd. Though he only hinted at this to Mr. Glanville, in a conversation he had with him while his dissatisfaction was at its height, concerning Arabella, yet the bare supposition that his father ever thought of such a thing, threw the young gentleman into such agonies, that Sir Charles, to compose him, protested he would do nothing in relation to his niece that he would not approve of. Yet he expostulated with him on the absurdity of her behaviour, and the ridicule to which she exposed herself wherever she went; appealing to him, whether in a wife he could think those follies supportable, which in a mistress occasioned him so much confusion.
Mr. Glanville, as much in love as he was, felt all the force of this inference, and acknowledged to his father, that he could not think of marrying Arabella, till the whims her romances had put into her head, were erased by a better knowledge of life and manners. But he added with a sigh, that he knew not how this reformation would be effected; for she had such a strange facility in reconciling every incident to her own fantastic ideas, that every new object added strength to the fatal deception she laboured under.