home he had no society; his wife's conversation was made up of small complaints, or smaller gossip; his health was too delicate, his tastes too refined, for the run of county sports and county dinners—he was therefore thrown much upon his own resources, and his books became, what Cicero emphatically calls them, his friends and companions. But though they employed, they did not absorb; and he early saw the propriety of a check on many domestic theories, equally destructive of credit and comfort; and little manœuvres to avoid his disapprobation, or conceal from his knowledge, were the grand employment of his lady's most abstruse faculties; so that if Emily missed his society, Mrs. Arundel still more missed his authority.
The delightful feeling of opposition—obstinacy is the heroism of little minds—was past; she had, however, found a great resource in the society of a Mrs. Clarke. That perfect knowledge of our neighbours—which, in spite of the selfishness ascribed to human nature, is always so much more interesting than our own—only to be obtained by personal inspection, from which Mrs. Arundel was, in her present early stage of widowhood, debarred, was supplied by this
