to her. Susan had always behaved pleasantly to herself, but the determined
character of her general manners had astonished and alarmed her, and it was at
least a fortnight before she began to understand a disposition so totally
different from her own. Susan saw that much was wrong at home, and wanted to set
it right. That a girl of fourteen, acting only on her own unassisted reason,
should err in the method of reform was not wonderful; and Fanny soon became more
disposed to admire the natural light of the mind which could so early
distinguish justly, than to censure severely the faults of conduct to which it
led. Susan was only acting on the same truths, and pursuing the same system,
which her own judgment acknowledged, but which her more supine and yielding
temper would have shrunk from asserting. Susan tried to be useful, where she
could only have gone away and cried; and that Susan was useful she could
perceive; that things, bad as they were, would have been worse but for such
interposition, and that both her mother and Betsey were restrained from some
excesses of very offensive indulgence and vulgarity.
    In every argument with her mother, Susan had in point of reason the
advantage, and never was there any maternal tenderness to buy her off. The blind
fondness which was for ever producing evil around her, she had never known.
There was no gratitude for affection past or present, to make her better bear
with its excesses to the others.
    All this became gradually evident, and gradually placed Susan before her
sister as an object of mingled compassion and respect. That her manner was
wrong, however, at times very wrong - her measures often ill-chosen and
ill-timed, and her looks and language very often indefensible, Fanny could not
cease to feel; but she began to hope they might be rectified. Susan, she found,
looked up to her and wished for her good opinion; and new as any thing like an
office of authority was to Fanny, new as it was to imagine herself capable of
guiding or informing any one, she did resolve to give occasional hints to Susan,
and endeavour to exercise for her advantage the juster notions of what was due
to every body, and what would be wisest for herself, which her own more favoured
education had fixed in her.
    Her influence, or at least the consciousness and use of it, originated in an
act of kindness by Susan, which after many hesitations of delicacy, she at last
worked herself up to. It had very early occurred to her, that a small sum of
money might