Catherine, in her extreme candour, persists that Miss Tilney must have been angry, since she was in the house, but would not see her—Catherine—when she called.
In Henry Tilney’s hasty explanation that it was his father—there was nothing in it, beyond the circumstance that General Tilney wished his daughter to walk out with him, and could not be kept waiting—we have the first hint that General Tilney has “ways.” He is, for that matter, an extremely tyrannical old gentleman.
Catherine has her walk, and for once the reality fulfils the expectation.
Whether intentionally or accidentally, Jane Austen illustrates the contrast between John Thorpe and Henry Tilney by their different estimates of novels. The walking-party had determined to walk round Beechen Cliff—“that noble hill,” Jane Austen calls it, in more than her ordinary chary words of description, “whose beautiful verdure and hanging coppice[29] render it so striking an object from almost every opening in Bath.”
“‘I never look at it,’ said Catherine, as they walked along the side of the river, ‘without thinking of the south of France.’
“‘You have been abroad then?’ said Henry, a little surprised.
“‘Oh, no; I only mean what I have read about. It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her father travelled through in the ‘Mysteries of Udolpho.’ But you never read novels, I dare say.’
“‘Why not?’
“‘Because they are not clever enough for you; gentlemen read better books.’
“‘The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and most of them with great pleasure. The ‘Mysteries of Udolpho,’ when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days, my hair standing on end the whole time.’