] It happened again, I simply couldn't read Chapter 2 without getting very angry! I know that dialog between mrs. and mr. John Dashwood is funny but he makes me mad! He needs a SUTH!

This is the first group read I've participated in from the beginning, so please forgive me if I'm asking naive questions. To begin with...

Could someone kindly explain to me just how John gets away with this socially? Of course our heroines don't have any legal claim on his money, but they're his nearest connections and as head of the family, surely he has a responsibility towards them! If we, two hundred years later think he's an undutiful cad, what must his contemporaries have thought? Yet nobody mentions it, or seems to want to snub him at all.