ABSTRACT
Accustomed insensibly to her solitude, Althea passed her time without murmuring. Her mind compelled thus to exert its strength at so early a period, and her education having been such as had not enfeebled while it ornamented her excellent understanding, she not only became reconciled to a situation which to most young women would have been intolerable, but every day learned to rejoice at the election she had made, and compare the melancholy tranquillity of her present situation with the splendid wretchedness to which an union with Mohun would have condemned her. Believing that, unless she could sell herself to some equally odious connection, the smallness of her fortune and the peculiar circumstances of her situation (held down as she was by the selfish policy of Lady Dacres) would prevent her ever marrying, she thought of passing her life, if not always in as solitary a manner as she now lived, yet certainly in a single state; and when she recollected all her aunt was, she thought of this rather with complacency than regret. Without predilection in favour of any one (for the infant preference she had felt for Marchmont could hardly be called so), she tried to look forward with cheerfulness to the few and simple duties that in such a situation, and with so small a fortune, she had to fulfil. There is no state of life in which objects for such duties may not be found; but none more forcibly attracted her benevolence than the poor old woman Mrs. Mosely, to whose cottage her lonely rambles were the most frequently directed, and who was become her regular pensioner.
