But though Mrs. Allen is content to be fine, and to look at other fine people, Catherine’s wishes naturally extend a little further—to no purpose, for her companion is indolent, and does nothing more than serenely regret that they know nobody, and that the Skinners who were at Bath last year are not there again. Catherine, though by no means an unreasonable girl, feels slightly disappointed and tired of the irksomeness of an imprisonment in a crush of men and women, in full dress, with faces unknown to her, furnishing no deliverer. Her first ball—that eagerly looked-forward-to era—threatens her with the shock and mortification of proving a good deal of a failure.
At last, when the rooms are beginning to thin and patient sitters can be better seen, though nobody starts with rapturous wonder on beholding Catherine, no whisper of eager inquiry runs round the room, nor is she once called a divinity by anybody, Catherine overhears two gentlemen speak of her as “a pretty girl.”
“Such words had their due effect. She immediately thought the evening pleasanter than she had found it before; her humble vanity was contented; she felt more obliged to the two young men for this simple praise than a true quality heroine would have been for fifteen sonnets in celebration of her charms, and went to her chair in good humour with everybody, and perfectly satisfied with her share of public attention.”
Fresh-hearted, girlish, young Catherine! with her innocent satisfaction in the bare information that she possesses her moderate share of God’s gift of womanly beauty. One can fancy her little feet, in their clocked stockings and shoes with buckles, tapping out on the floor of the ancient sedan-chair, in which she is borne home from her modest revelry, that dance of which she has been defrauded.
But was it not like Jane Austen to leave her heroine without a partner at her first ball? After all, may not the temporary eclipse befall a girl without any fault of hers, or of others, and cannot the example of Catherine Morland teach her fellow-sufferers good-humoured resignation? It is the arrogant, ungenerous employment of such petty terms of slighting reproach as “wallflowers,” with the exaggeration of their influence by sensitive, inexperienced girls, which often renders harmless, youthful gaieties fertile in miserable mean jealousies, despicable, ill-bred triumphs, and endless heart-burnings.
After the usual routine of shopping and sightseeing, in addition to the Pump-room, after the Allens had visited the Lower as well as the Upper Rooms with which Bath was supplied, Catherine has at last the satisfaction of finding the Master of the Ceremonies leading up to her, according to the etiquette of his office, a gentlemanlike young man named Tilney, who has desired to be presented to her, in order to ask her to be his partner in a country dance.
Catherine’s partner, whom she regards with a flush of flattered pleasure, because he has flattered her by his selection of her—an absolute stranger in the crowded assembly, is about four or five and twenty, rather tall, and has one of those pleasing countenances to which Jane Austen always gave a marked and deserved preference over mere regularity of feature or glow of colouring. As to an interesting haggardness, a charming suspicion of wickedness, she, with all other good women in their senses, could not see either interest or charm in them.
Mr. Tilney possesses another advantage which was also in special favour with the author—a very intelligent, lively eye. The languidly supercilious and stupid “swells” of the nineteenth century would have been odious to the brilliant novelist of the eighteenth, even though she could have seen them endowed with tawny beards, Greek profiles, and that comically dubious attribute, a sleepy blue eye. The reputation of these fine gentlemen as lady-killers of the first water would have struck her in the light of an unmitigated disgrace, and not a crowning honour. The flavour of vice which seems to have so irresistible an attraction for many writers and readers would have been utterly repugnant to her, as to all pure-minded, high-souled men and women.
Henry Tilney begins his acquaintance with Catherine Morland, by making kindly fun to her and of her, with great impartiality.
Catherine, sometimes seeing through his assumptions, sometimes thoroughly taken in by them, is equally pleased, in sheer willingness to be pleased.