"If we had nothing worse to dread than her attempting to go on the
stage, I should not feel the distress and dismay which now overpower me.
Hundreds of other girls have acted as recklessly as she has acted, and
have not ended ill after all. But my fears for Magdalen do not begin and
end with the risk she is running at present.
"There has been something weighing on her mind ever since we left
Combe-Raven--weighing far more heavily for the last six weeks than at
first. Until the period when Francis Clare left England, I am persuaded
she was secretly sustained by the hope that he would contrive to see her
again. From the day when she knew that the measures you had taken for
preventing this had succeeded; from the day when she was assured that
the ship had really taken him away, nothing has roused, nothing has
interested her. She has given herself up, more and more hopelessly, to
her own brooding thoughts; thoughts which I believe first entered
her mind on the day when the utter ruin of the prospects on which her
marriage depended was made known to her. She has formed some desperate
project of contesting the possession of her father's fortune with
Michael Vanstone; and the stage career which she has gone away to try is
nothing more than a means of freeing herself from all home dependence,
and of enabling her to run what mad risks she pleases, in perfect
security from all home control.
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