Emma

by Jane Austen

Mrs. Goddard was the mistress of a School—not of a seminary, or an establishment, or any thing which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality, upon new principles and new systems—and where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity—but a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold

at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way, and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies.

produced the portfolio containing her various attempts

at portraits, for not one of them had ever been finished,

friend; but so good a charade must not be

and great girls in the school; and it must be

increased; their want of a larger house, their

"Imprudent, if you please—but not mad.

A young lady who faints, must be recovered; questions must be answered, and surprizes be explained.

faultless in spite of all her faults,