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Reading progress update: I've read 87 out of 190 pages.
After one of her daughter's had fallen into a neighbor's slimy green pond:
"It was no use sending for the doctor because there is no doctor within reach; a fact which simplifies life amazingly when you ave children. During the time we lived in town the doctor was never out of the house. Hardly a day passed but one or other of the Three had a spot, or, as the expressive German has it, a Pickel,* and what parent could resist sending for a doctor when one lived round the corner? But doctors are like bad habits -- once you have shaken them off you discover how much better you are without them; and as for the babies, since theiy inhabit a garden, prompt bed and the above-mentioned simple remedy** have been all that is necessary to keep them robust."
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* which I'd actually rather translate as "pimple", myself ...
** That remedy being castor oil, poor lambs!!
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And then we get to the point where it becomes clear once and for all why Elizabeth loved Austen:
"I had heard of a little boy who had drunk seltzer water and thereupon been seized with typhoid fever and had died, and if, I asked myself with a power fo reasoning unusual in a woman, you die after seltzer water, what will you not do after frog-pond?"
