Sense and sensibility in Washington Square

I’m on chapter 15 of Washington Square. 
Dr Sloper has expressed his disapproval of Morris Townsend, refusing to give his consent, and Catherine is bearing it in silence, not throwing any tantrums. Not knowing how she feels nor why she acts the way she does, he concludes that she’s not “a woman of great spirit”. 
Now look at this line: 

“I know not whether he had hoped for a little more resistance for the sake of a little more entertainment; but he said to himself, as he had said before, that though it might have its momentary alarms, paternity was, after all, not an exciting vocation.” 

Her father doesn’t seem to care how she feels. He’s busy taking pride in reading people, figuring Morris out, playing mind game, and doing “detective” work (meeting Morris’s sister), and now he’s surprised and disappointed that Catherine doesn’t play the role of a lovelorn woman. 
Now look at the aunt: 

“Mrs. Penniman took too much satisfaction in the sentimental shadows of this little drama to have, for the moment, any great interest in dissipating them.  She wished the plot to thicken, and the advice that she gave her niece tended, in her own imagination, to produce this result.  It was rather incoherent counsel, and from one day to another it contradicted itself; but it was pervaded by an earnest desire that Catherine should do something striking.  […] Mrs. Penniman’s real hope was that the girl would make a secret marriage, at which she should officiate as brideswoman or duenna.  She had a vision of this ceremony being performed in some subterranean chapel—subterranean chapels in New York were not frequent, but Mrs. Penniman’s imagination was not chilled by trifles—and of the guilty couple—she liked to think of poor Catherine and her suitor as the guilty couple—being shuffled away in a fast-whirling vehicle to some obscure lodging in the suburbs, where she would pay them (in a thick veil) clandestine visits, where they would endure a period of romantic privation, and where ultimately, after she should have been their earthly providence, their intercessor, their advocate, and their medium of communication with the world, they should be reconciled to her brother in an artistic tableau, in which she herself should be somehow the central figure.” 

I know enough about Washington Square to know Catherine will defy everyone’s expectations, but this is the moment I have so much pity for her, because the people who are supposed to care for her and do the most for her only see her as a pawn, a plaything, and her whole courtship as a drama, or a game. The father has no sensibility, the aunt has no sense, nobody cares about how she feels and nobody offers her real guidance. 
Mrs Penniman is like an Austenian figure (not in the sense that she’s like any Jane Austen character in particular, nobody comes to mind, but in the sense she can fit right in a Jane Austen novel). 

“[Morris] kept her waiting for half an hour—he had almost the whole width of the city to traverse—but she liked to wait, it seemed to intensify the situation.  She ordered a cup of tea, which proved excessively bad, and this gave her a sense that she was suffering in a romantic cause.” 

Such a goose.  

“This interview could take place only on neutral ground, and she bethought herself greatly before selecting a place of meeting.  She had an inclination for Greenwood Cemetery, but she gave it up as too distant; she could not absent herself for so long, as she said, without exciting suspicion.  Then she thought of the Battery, but that was rather cold and windy, besides one’s being exposed to intrusion from the Irish emigrants who at this point alight, with large appetites, in the New World and at last she fixed upon an oyster saloon in the Seventh Avenue, kept by a negro—an establishment of which she knew nothing save that she had noticed it in passing.  She made an appointment with Morris Townsend to meet him there, and she went to the tryst at dusk, enveloped in an impenetrable veil.  […] When Morris at last arrived, they sat together for half an hour in the duskiest corner of a back shop…” 

This is an interesting contrast with Catherine—earlier, as written in the previous post, Morris Townsend suggests meeting in the square in the dark, where nobody can see them, and Catherine refuses, and in the end he has to come to the house and meet her there. 
Catherine is underestimated.
Dr Sloper isn’t as wise and clever as the narrator and other people think he is. How can he give someone like Mrs Penniman the job of making Catherine a clever woman, when she doesn’t have an ounce of sense in her? I think he already gives up on his daughter from the start, because he sees the female sex as inferior, with the only exception of his poor wife, whose death he blames on Catherine.