[Mansfield Park by Jane Austen]@TWC D-Link bookMansfield Park CHAPTER XXV 8/21
The place deserves it, and you will find yourself not satisfied with much less than it is capable of. (Excuse me, your ladyship must not see your cards.
There, let them lie just before you.) The place deserves it, Bertram.
You talk of giving it the air of a gentleman's residence.
_That_ will be done by the removal of the farmyard; for, independent of that terrible nuisance, I never saw a house of the kind which had in itself so much the air of a gentleman's residence, so much the look of a something above a mere parsonage-house--above the expenditure of a few hundreds a year.
It is not a scrambling collection of low single rooms, with as many roofs as windows; it is not cramped into the vulgar compactness of a square farmhouse: it is a solid, roomy, mansion-like looking house, such as one might suppose a respectable old country family had lived in from generation to generation, through two centuries at least, and were now spending from two to three thousand a year in." Miss Crawford listened, and Edmund agreed to this.
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