memorial and lay it before the Dean and Chapter, and have no doubt of redress from that pious, learned, and disinterested body." She then gives a cheerful account of their lodgings, and winds up with a touching expression of grateful humility: "God bless you, my dear E. If ever you are ill, may you be as tenderly nursed as I have been. May the same blessed alleviations of anxious sympathising friends be yours: and may you possess, as I daresay you will, the greatest blessing of all in the consciousness of not being unworthy of their love. I could not feel this." Soon afterwards she writes even more touchingly: "I will only say further that my dearest sister, my tender, watchful, indefatigable nurse, has not been made ill by her exertions. As to what I owe her, and the anxious affection of all my beloved family on this occasion, I can only cry over it, and pray God to bless them more and more."
She was now fully aware of her state and in no way alarmed by it, though—might she have chosen—she would gladly have lived longer. Every year was bringing her fresh fame and giving her new assurances of success; she was surrounded by loving relations and friends; and she had scarcely reached middle age. Her brothers were scattered in their own various homes, but their children were a constant interest and pleasure to her, and she had the unceasing companionship of the sister who was more than anyone else to her, and from whom she had been so little separated. There was much to make life sweet to Jane Austen at the age of forty-two; nothing that should make her wish to leave it, and yet, with her usual contentedness, she quietly acquiesced
