Page:Guy Mannering Vol 1.djvu/289

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
GUY MANNERING.
279

CHAPTER XVIII.


Talk with a man out of a window!—a proper saying.


We must proceed with our extracts of Miss Mannering's letters, which throw light upon natural good sense, principle, and feelings, blemished by an imperfect education, and the folly of a misjudging mother, who called her husband in her heart a tyrant until she feared him as such, and read romances until she became so enamoured of the complicated intrigues which they contain, as to assume the management of a little family novel of her own, and constitute her daughter, a girl of sixteen, the principal heroine. She delighted in petty mystery,