But Catherine answers him very sensibly, and with a charming sincerity that disarms his mocking mood. “No,” said Catherine, “ought I? To say the truth, though I am hurt and grieved that I cannot still love her, that I am never to hear from her, perhaps never to see her again, I do not feel so very much afflicted as one would have thought.”
“You feel as you always do, what is most to the credit of human nature. Such feelings ought to be investigated, that they may know themselves.”
We can easily understand how Catherine’s spirits revive under this conversation.
The happiest episode of Catherine’s visit to Northanger Abbey is her going with the Tilneys—the idea of the visit having originated with the General—to “eat their mutton” with Henry in his parsonage at Woodston. An abbey has become no more to Catherine than any other building. There is nothing now so alluring to her imagination as the unpretending comfort of a “well-connected parsonage”—something like Catherine’s home at Fullerton, but better. Fullerton has its faults, but Woodston probably has none.
Before the visit, it has seemed to Catherine that the Wednesday when she is to go to Woodston will never come. She dreads the arrival in the meantime of Captain Tilney to ask his father’s consent to his marriage. But no Captain Tilney makes his appearance, and all goes well. The day comes, proves fine, and Catherine treads on air. “By ten o’clock the chaise and four conveyed the party from the Abbey, and after an agreeable drive of almost twenty miles they entered Woodston, a large and populous village in a situation not unpleasant. Catherine was ashamed to say how pretty she thought it, as the General seemed to think an apology necessary for the flatness of the country and size of the village; but in her heart she preferred it to any place she had ever been at, and looked with great admiration at every neat house above the rank of a cottage, and at all the little chandler’s shops which they passed. At the farther end of the village, and tolerably disengaged from the rest of it, stood the parsonage, a new-built, substantial, stone house, with its semi-circular sweep and green gates; and as they drove up to the door, Henry, with the friends of his solitude—a large Newfoundland puppy and two or three terriers—was ready to receive and make much of them.”
The General’s hints and allusions, with his requests for Catherine’s opinion and approval, which now become more conspicuous and significant than ever, may be embarrassing, but it is a delicious embarrassment.
Catherine thinks the house the most comfortable in England, and cannot hide her admiration of the prettily-shaped unfurnished drawing-room. “‘Oh! why do you not fit up this room, Mr. Tilney? What a pity not to have it fitted up. It is the prettiest room I ever saw; it is the prettiest room in the world!’
“‘I trust,’ said the General with a most satisfied smile, ‘that it will very speedily be furnished: it waits only for a lady’s taste.’
“‘Well, if it was my house, I should never sit anywhere else. Oh! what a sweet little cottage there is among the trees; apple-trees too! It is the prettiest cottage——’
“‘You like it? you approve of it as an object? It is enough. Henry, remember that Robinson is spoken to about it. The cottage remains.’