Read it through once

While the Doctor was still in London an offer came from one of Miss Mitford’s cousins—a Mrs. Raggett—suggesting that she should give up authorship altogether and live with her and her husband, the scheme being that Miss Mitford should act as reader and secretary to Mr. Raggett, who was nearly blind, and be a companion to his wife. “The offer had great temptation,” she told William Harness, “and I have no doubt we should have been happy together, but it is clear my father’s comfort would have been destroyed by such an arrangement; the sacrifice of his old habits—his old friends—the blameless self-importance which results from his station as Chairman of the Reading Bench—and his really influential position in this county, where we are much respected in spite of our poverty, would have been far too much to ask or to permit. I refused it therefore at once.”