Yikes! Is this the Brother From Hell, or what? I confessed earlier that one of my brothers was a John Thorpe - he is, in the bending time and space to fit his own beliefs of himself and the world kind of way. But the real McCoy is just horrible in his treatment of his sisters and mother.

Whereas James Morland greets his sister with careless affection, John Thorpe greets his sister with just plain carelessness, offering her a bare touch of the hand. When he greets his younger sisters at their lodgings,

“…he then bestowed an equal portion of his fraternal tenderness, for her asked each of them how they did, and observed that they both looked very ugly.”

There is no report on how they took his effusions, and not much in these early chapters to detail just how he and Isabella get along. Later at the ball, he calls these same sisters and their dancing partners the “…four greater quizzes in the room … I have been laughing at them this half hour.”

What a guy.

His mother doesn’t fare any better:

”Ah, mother! How do you do?” said he, giving her a hearty shake of the hand: “where did you get that quiz of a hat, it makes you look like an old witch?”

But JA reports that “…this address seemed to satisfy all the fondest wishes of the mother’s heart, for she received him with the most delighted and exulting affection.”