“A specimen of the thanks one gets,” cried Mrs. Markleham, in tears, “for taking care of one’s family! I wish I was a Turk!”

(“I wish you were, with all my heart⁠—and in your native country!” said my aunt.)

“It was at that time that mama was most solicitous about my Cousin Maldon. I had liked him:” she spoke softly, but without any hesitation: “very much. We had been little lovers once. If circumstances had not happened otherwise, I might have come to persuade myself that I really loved him, and might have married him, and been most wretched. There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.”

I pondered on those words, even while I was studiously attending to what followed, as if they had some particular interest, or some strange application that I could not divine. “There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose”⁠—“no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.”