“True, my Cecilia,” answered Delvile, “and generous and condescending as true; and if _you_ can thus sweetly comply, I will gratefully forbear making any opposition. Too much already have you suffered from the impetuosity of my temper, but I will try to curb it in future by the remembrance of your injuries.” “The whole of this unfortunate business,” said Dr Lyster, “has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE. Your uncle, the Dean, began it, by his arbitrary will, as if an ordinance of his own could arrest the course of nature! and as if _he_ had power to keep alive, by the loan of a name, a family in the male branch already extinct. Your father, Mr Mortimer, continued it with the same self-partiality, preferring the wretched gratification of tickling his ear with a favourite sound, to the solid happiness of his son with a rich and deserving wife. Yet this, however, remember; if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination: for all that I could say to Mr Delvile, either of reasoning or entreaty,--and I said all I could suggest, and I suggested all a man need wish to hear,--was totally thrown away, till I pointed out to him his _own_ disgrace, in having a _daughter-in-law_ immured in these mean lodgings! “Thus, my dear young lady, the terror which drove you to this house, and the sufferings which have confined you in it, will prove, in the event, the source of your future peace: for when all my best rhetorick failed to melt Mr Delvile, I instantly brought him to terms by coupling his name with a pawnbroker's! And he could not with more disgust hear his son called Mr Beverley, than think of his son's wife when he hears of the _Three Blue Balls_! Thus the same passions, taking but different directions, _do_ mischief and _cure_ it alternately. “Such, my good young friends, is the MORAL of your calamities. You have all, in my opinion, been strangely at cross purposes, and trifled, no one knows why, with the first blessings of life. My only hope is that now, having among you thrown away its luxuries, you will have known enough of misery to be glad to keep its necessaries.” This excellent man was yet prevailed upon by Delvile to stay and assist in removing the feeble Cecilia to St James's-square. Henrietta, for whom Mr Arnott's equipage and servants had still remained in town, was then, though with much difficulty, persuaded to go back to Suffolk: but Cecilia, however fond of her society, was too sensible of the danger and impropriety of her present situation, to receive from it any pleasure.