Free Northanger Abbey and Angels and Dragons by Jane Austen, Vera Nazarian

was.
    John Thorpe, who in the meantime had been giving orders about the horses, soon joined them.
    Preceding him came the heat of a furnace. But even before it struck full force, Catherine saw him, and muttered, “Oh dear, he is an ogre!”
    It was indeed the frightful truth. Seen with the clarity of supernatural vision that Catherine now enjoyed, he was a large bulky gentleman with limbs like trunks and a torso like a barrel of old port. His skin was coarse and elephantine, swarthier than his sister’s, and with an even more greenish tint—a few degrees more and his complexion might have rivaled a toad. His hair stuck out like dry straw from underneath the edges of his otherwise stylish top hat, and had a suspiciously fire-tinged ruddy tint, as though it’s been though a curtain of flames. And when he grinned, his teeth were simply enormous—
    Oh dear, Catherine thought. Indeed, she was so struck by the oddity before her that she forgot to be properly frightened or alarmed, and unabashedly stared in amazement (a behavior which later she comprehended to be hardly appropriate on her part; no wonder the gentleman may have gotten certain ideas).
    Possibly as a result of her particularly fixed examination, she directly received from him the amends which were her due. For while he slightly and carelessly touched the hand of Isabella—causing a strong hiss of steam in the atmosphere as hellish heat met sepulchral cold and issued forth precipitation—on her he bestowed a whole scrape and half a short bow.
    Angels immediately rose in glorious motion to hover in the air between Catherine and him in a translucent wall of glittering light, and managed to alleviate the furnace blasts that threatened to overbear Catherine, into reasonable summer mid-noon levels.
    But nature was less tolerant. It started to rain overhead, big sloppy droplets, but only in their immediate vicinity of about five feet. However, this being England, no one was particularly flummoxed even by such a particularly localized, extraordinarily specific example of maudlin weather.
    It must be said that, to anyone else who did not have the metaphysical visual acuity of Catherine, this is what they saw when they observed John Thorpe—a stout young man of middling height, who, with a plain face and ungraceful form, seemed fearful of being too handsome unless he wore the dress of a groom, and too much like a gentleman unless he were easy where he ought to be civil, and impudent where he might be allowed to be easy.
    He took out his watch: “How long do you think we have been running it from Tetbury, Miss Morland?”
    Catherine still recovering from the amazement, took several additional moments to gather her mind in reply. “I do not know the distance.”
    Her brother—flushed in the face as though he’d been working a smithy’s bellows—told her that it was twenty-three miles.
    “Three and twenty!” cried Thorpe—and his voice sounded like a foghorn to Catherine. “Five and twenty if it is an inch.”
    And then the two gentlemen meaningfully argued meaningless distances. “I defy any man in England to make my horse go less than ten miles an hour in harness,” ended Thorpe on an uproar.
    “You have lost an hour,” said Morland; “it was only ten o’clock when we came from Tetbury.”
    “Ten o’clock! It was eleven, upon my soul! This brother of yours would persuade me out of my senses, Miss Morland; do but look at my horse; did you ever see an animal so made for speed in your life?” (The servant, also red in the face from being in the scalding gentleman’s company had just mounted the carriage and was driving off.)
    “He does look very hot, to be sure,” said Catherine, glancing in their wake, feeling rather heated herself (and in a not-so-good way), in John Thorpe’s proximity. She wondered about the poor horse having had to endure such ghastly atmosphere for so many miles. Not to mention, her poor brother!
    James did appear to be sweating at