“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.”
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.
