“Yes, here I am, Sophia, quite ready to make a foolish match.  Anybody between fifteen and thirty may have me for asking.  A little beauty, and a few smiles, and a few compliments to the navy, and I am a lost man.  Should not this be enough for a sailor, who has had no society among women to make him nice?”

He said it, she knew, to be contradicted.  His bright proud eye spoke the conviction that he was nice; and Anne Elliot was not out of his thoughts, when he more seriously described the woman he should wish to meet with.  “A strong mind, with sweetness of manner,” made the first and the last of the description.

“That is the woman I want,” said he.  “Something a little inferior I shall of course put up with, but it must not be much.  If I am a fool, I shall be a fool indeed, for I have thought on the subject more than most men.”

Chapter 8

From this time Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliot were repeatedly in the same circle.  They were soon dining in company together at Mr Musgrove’s, for the little boy’s state could no longer supply his aunt with a pretence for absenting herself; and this was but the beginning of other dinings and other meetings.

Whether former feelings were to be renewed must be brought to the proof; former times must undoubtedly be brought to the recollection of each; they could not but be reverted to; the year of their engagement could not but be named by him, in the little narratives or descriptions which conversation called forth.  His profession qualified him, his disposition lead him, to talk; and “That was in the year six;” “That happened before I went to sea in the year six,” occurred in the course of the first evening they spent together:  and though his voice did not falter, and though she had no reason to suppose his eye wandering towards her while he spoke, Anne felt the utter impossibility, from her knowledge of his mind, that he could be unvisited by remembrance any more than herself.  There must be the same immediate association of thought, though she was very far from conceiving it to be of equal pain.

They had no conversation together, no intercourse but what the commonest civility required.  Once so much to each other!  Now nothing!  There had been a time, when of all the large party now filling the drawing-room at Uppercross, they would have found it most difficult to cease to speak to one another.  With the exception, perhaps, of Admiral and Mrs Croft, who seemed particularly attached and happy, (Anne could allow no other exceptions even among the married couples), there could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved.  Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted.  It was a perpetual estrangement.