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.
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