Miss Darcy lost her mother at an age when she could only just remember her countenance or her caresses. Her mother was succeeded by no-one in a capacity to love her and guide her; the few years following in which her father also lived, were insufficient in this case to secure a replacement to her father as a wife, or to Georgiana as a mother. Her father had been, indeed, all that was generous and kind, but he was not so young as to enjoy a child’s company, and, as a father, he had little to say to her; her education was not his sphere. Her brother was of the same liberal and benevolent disposition as his father, and Georgiana had loved him in the place of a father, with full as many tremblings, and with so much respect, it might as well be called reverence at once. His pride she saw as disapproval, and his aloofness as detachment, and a distance that was entirely beyond her small powers to surmount. And, as children often do, she blamed herself not only for her own loneliness, but also in some inchoate way, for both the loss that procured it and her feebleness in resisting it. As a consequence, she never risked her own opinions for fear of losing such occasional companions, and when she did have company, it was her paramount endeavour to be pleasing to others, and always in agreement with whatever was said. Her years of application admitted much that could have been safely hazarded with sense and erudition, but the idea of being found disagreeable and losing the regard of her few friends entirely overwhelmed any idea that she might put herself forward; and, as her opinions were never ventured, she was left in perpetual doubt as to their merit, as well as her own.