“My dear child, commend Dr. Grant to the deanery of Westminster or St. Paul’s, and I should be as glad of your nurseryman and poulterer as you could be. But we have no such people in Mansfield. Instead we have an oddly shuffling fellow or two with horrid skin, who bump around all day uselessly underfoot, and seem to do no work at all. What would you have me do?”

“I mean to be too rich to lament anything of the sort. A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.”

“You intend to be very rich?” said Edmund, with a look which, to Fanny’s eye, had a great deal of serious meaning.

“To be sure. Do not you? Do not we all?”

“I cannot intend anything which must be so completely beyond my power to command. Miss Crawford may chuse her degree of wealth. She has only to fix on her number of thousands a year, and there can be no doubt of their coming. My intentions are only not to be poor.”

“By moderation and economy, and bringing down your wants to your income, and all that. I understand you—and a very proper plan it is for a person at your time of life, with such limited means and indifferent connexions. What can you want but a decent maintenance? You have not much time before you; and your relations are in no situation to do anything for you. Be honest and poor, by all means—but I shall not envy you; I do not much think I shall even respect you. I have a much greater respect for those that are honest and rich.”

“Your degree of respect for honesty, rich or poor, is precisely what I have no manner of concern with. I do not mean to be poor but something between.”

“But I do look down upon ‘between,’ if it might have been higher. There is no contentment in obscurity, when it might have risen to distinction.”

“But how may it rise? How may my honesty at least rise to any distinction?”

This was not so very easy a question to answer, and occasioned an “Oh!” of some length from the fair lady before she could add, “You ought to be in parliament, or you should have gone into the army ten years ago.”

“Ah, parliament. I believe I must wait till there is an especial assembly for the representation of younger sons who have little to live on. No, Miss Crawford,” he added, in a more serious tone, “there are distinctions which I aspire to, but they are of a different character.”

Miss Crawford made some laughing answer, which was sorrowful food for Fanny’s observation. Without much more pause, Fanny made her adieus; and Edmund suddenly recalled that his mother had been inquiring for her, and that he had walked down to the Parsonage on purpose to bring her back.