She reflected on her present situation, compared to what it would have been had she been prevailed upon to become the wife of Delamere against the consent of his family.
Splendid as his fortune was, and high as his rank would raise her above her present lot of life, she thought that neither would reconcile her to the painful circumstance of carrying uneasiness and contention into his family; of being thrown from them with contempt, as the disgrace of their rank and the ruin of their hopes; and of living in perpetual apprehension lest the subsiding fondness of her husband should render her the object of his repentance and regret.
The regard she was sensible of for Delamere did not make her blind to his faults; and she saw, with pain, that the ungovernable violence of his temper frequently obscured all his good qualities, and gave his character an appearance of ferocity, which offered no very flattering prospect to whosoever should be his wife.
By thus reasoning with herself, she soon became more calm, and more reconciled to that destiny which seemed not to design her for Delamere.
She met with no remarkable occurrence in her journey; and on the evening of the third day arrived in town; where the servant who attended her was ordered to dismiss the chaise, and to procure her an hackney coach, in which she proceeded to the house of Mrs. Ashwood.
This residence, situated in a populous village three miles from London, bore the appearance of wealth and prosperity. The iron gate, which gave entrance into a large court, was opened by a servant in a laced livery, to whom Emmeline delivered the letter she had brought from Mrs. Stafford, and after a moment's waiting the lady herself came out to receive her.
Emmeline, by the splendour of her dress, concluded she had left a large company: but being ushered into a parlour, found she had been drinking tea alone; of which, or of any other refreshment, Miss Mowbray was desired to partake.
Her reception of her visitor was perfectly cordial; and Emmeline soon recovering her easy and composed manner, Mrs. Ashwood seemed very much pleased with her guest; for there was in her countenance a passport to all hearts.
Mrs. Ashwood, tho' not in the bloom of life, and tho' she never had been handsome, was so unconscious of her personal disadvantages, that she imagined herself the object of admiration of one sex and of the imitation of the other. With the most perfect reliance on the graces of a figure which never struck any other person as being at all remarkable, she dressed with an exuberance of expence; and kept all the company her neighbourhood afforded.
Where her ruling passions, (the love of admiration and excessive vanity) did not interfere, she was sometimes generous and sometimes friendly. But her ideas of her own perfections, both of person and mind, far exceeding the truth, she had often the mortification to find that others by no means thought of them as she did; and then her good humour was far from invincible.