There was comfort also in Tom, who gradually regained his health, without regaining the thoughtlessness and selfishness and witlessness of his previous habits. He was permanently improved by his illness. He had suffered, he had been Exorcised, and he had learned to think—three advantages he had never known before. His self-reproach arising from the deplorable event in Wimpole Street (to which he felt himself accessory by the dangerous intimacy of his unjustifiable theatre) made an impression. At the age of six-and-twenty, with good sensible companions, his mind was exposed to durable happy effects including (via his brother’s tireless efforts) the holy cleansing ritual of the church. Once purged of the various Curses of personal incompetence, he became what he ought to be—useful to his father, potently resistant to the influence of vampires, gaming halls, impossible gambles, and other spawn of the dark, steady and quiet, and not living merely for himself. (Though, it must be said that occasionally Tom was seen in the back of the stables, calling quietly for his Quackie, and then discreetly feeding great amounts of hen-seed to something monstrously large and winged in the shrubbery. . . .)

Here was comfort indeed! Soon, Edmund contributed to Sir Thomas’s ease by improvement in his own spirits—the only point in which he had given his father pain before. After wandering about and sitting under trees with Fanny all the summer evenings, he had so well talked his mind into submission as to be very tolerably cheerful again.

These were the circumstances which gradually brought alleviation to Sir Thomas, deadening his sense of loss, and in part reconciling him to himself. Though, the anguish from admitting his own errors in the education of his daughters was never to be entirely done away.

Too late he became aware how unfavourable to the character of any young people was the contradictory treatment which Maria and Julia had always experienced at home—the excessive indulgence and flattery of their aunt continually contrasted with his own severity. He saw how ill he had judged, expecting to counteract what was wrong in Mrs. Norris (not merely lycanthropy) by its reverse in himself. He had but increased the evil by teaching them to repress their spirits in his presence, making their real disposition unknown to him. This in turn sent them off, for all their indulgences, to a person who had been able to attach them only by the blindness of her affection, and the excess of her praise.

Here had been grievous mismanagement; but it had not been the worst mistake in his plan of education. Something must have been wanting within, or time would have worn away much of its ill effect. He feared that active principle had been wanting in his daughters. They had never been properly taught to govern themselves by a true sense of duty. They had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice.