Page:Essays in miniature.djvu/170

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166
THREE FAMOUS OLD MAIDS

seem, for a little later we hear of a morning coat which is much too light to please Jane's critical eye. She cannot possibly give her maiden affections to a man who would wear such a coat, and so, after a while, he disappears from her pages and her life, to go out into the world, and win much legal renown, and be Chief Justice of Ireland, and always to remember with great tenderness the gay young girl at Ashe. Then there appears on the scene that unnamed friend of Mrs. Lefroy's, whose love is so sudden and fervent that Miss Austen feels quite sure it will soon decline into "sensible indifference," as, no doubt, it does. Then the suitor who has "the recommendation of good character, and a good position in life, of everything in fact except the subtle power of touching my heart"—which seems to have been the real difficulty with them all. Sir Francis Doyle, indeed, tells a very pretty and pathetic tale of Jane Austen's engagement to a naval officer who, after the peace of 1820, accompanied his fiancée and her family to Switzerland. Here he started off on foot one