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

the temples, and his pleasant countenance was ruddier than usual—but was cooling down rapidly in the icy proximity of arctic Isabella.
    In all this, the angels were making haste in moving back and forth between their Morland sibling charges, in some distress, trying to cool one down and warm the other by fanning the air with their bright wings, this way and that way . . . and this way and that way . . . and—
    “Hot!” exclaimed Thorpe meanwhile, unable to forget his horse. “Why, he had not turned a hair till we came to Walcot Church; but look at his forehand! Look at his loins!”
    “Dearest John, there is hardly any need for Miss Morland to look at his loins,” put in Isabella.
    “—only see how he moves; that horse cannot go less than ten miles an hour: tie his legs and he will get on—” John Thorpe was not to be silenced. That is until he himself changed the topic: “What do you think of my gig, Miss Morland? A neat one, is not it? Well hung; town-built—” his voice roared and ripped the air, modulating in ogrish crescendos, and would have been audible as a hellish monstrosity far across Cheap Street to anyone who was as metaphysically attuned as Catherine (all others merely heard a horrid foghorn).
    “And how much do you think he asked for it, Miss Morland?” he finished at last, after describing a tedious purchase transaction.
    “I am sure I cannot guess at all.”
    “He asked fifty guineas; I threw down the money, and the carriage was mine!”
    “And I am sure,” said Catherine, “I know so little of such things that I cannot judge whether it was cheap or dear.”
    “Neither one nor t’other; I might have got it for less; but I hate haggling, and the poor fellow wanted cash.”
    “That was very good-natured of you,” said Catherine, quite pleased to be able to say something relevant and even minimally positive in light of so much heat .
    “Oh! D—— it, when one has the means of doing a kind thing by a friend, I hate to be pitiful.”
    “Do not believe it, Catherine!” the angels clamored. “All kindness of his kind has ulterior motives!”
    “Yes, I am not all daft, thank you!” she replied smartly, rather aggrieved by the heat and the cold in the vicinity, and then coughed profusely to make up for her mumble.
    “Gracious! My sweet, I do hope you are not developing a sore throat,” announced Isabella, in her honey intonations, but with just a hint of solemn meaning . “Or was it something you said? I did not quite catch, with all your coughing.”
    “Oh no, I am quite fine—that is, ’tis nothing, cough cough!” said Catherine, while a chill of another sort came to her. What if horrid Isabella and her dreadful ogre brother—being what they were, unnatural —could see the angels too? Or at least be aware of them somehow?
    Did they know what she could see? And did they perchance know she could see them?
    While our heroine was beset by these new alarms, it was decided that the gentlemen should accompany the young ladies to Edgar’s Buildings, and pay their respects to Mrs. Thorpe.
    James and Isabella led the way, moving along the street like an arctic cold front. And so well satisfied was Isabella with her lot, so content to ensure a pleasant walk for her brother’s friend, and her friend’s brother, so pure and uncoquettish were her feelings, that—though they passed certain two young men—she paid them no notice whatsoever and looked back at them only three times.
    John Thorpe kept of course with Catherine, following up the cold front with a major heat wave. After a few minutes’ silence, he renewed the conversation about his gig. “Miss Morland, it would be reckoned a cheap thing by some. I might have sold it for ten guineas more the next day! Morland was with me at the time.”
    “Yes,” said Morland, who overheard this; “but you forget that your horse was included.”
    “My horse! Oh, d—— it! I would not sell my horse for a hundred. Are you fond of