Sir Walter Elliot and the “character of hospitality”
It did not appear to him that Sir Walter could materially alter his style of living in a house which had such a character of hospitality and ancient dignity to support. (Persuasion 14) [all references to the Cambridge UP edition, Janet Todd, general editor]
This sentiment, expressed by Sir Walter’s obsequious yet very practical lawyer, Mr. Shepherd, seems to be the deciding moment in Sir Walter’s decision to vacate his inherited home, rent it out, and pursue a less expensive lifestyle in Bath. The statement is rendered in an interesting combination of free indirect style but printed with quotation marks indicating that Mr. Shepherd has spoken his words aloud yet the language is nonetheless funneled through the mediating discourse of a narrator, based on the back-shifted verb tenses and the third person pronouns. So readers understand Mr. Shepherd to be speaking as we would do in a case of free indirect style, but we also realize the quoted words are not exactly what he said. They are a repetition or rehearsal of his words parroted through another idiolect (or distinctive individual language). Mr. Shepherd thus emerges as a character through an ironic differentiation of his own idiolect from the narrator’s idiolect, one which is already familiar to readers by this second chapter of the novel.
This is one of the three times that Austen uses the word “hospitality” in the novel. Here is a quick frequency graph of Austen’s usage of this word compared to the frequency of a few other terms of relevance:
http://voyant-tools.org/corpus=1397125788817.9365&stopList=stop.en.taporware.txt
Digging Liberal Arts 
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