more equal to act, more justified in acting.  And there, as they slowly paced the gradual ascent, heedless of every group around them, seeing neither sauntering politicians, bustling housekeepers, flirting girls, nor nursery-maids and children, they could indulge in those retrospections and acknowledgements, and especially in those explanations of what had directly preceded the present moment, which were so poignant and so ceaseless in interest.  All the little variations of the last week were gone through; and of yesterday and today there could scarcely be an end.

She had not mistaken him.  Jealousy of Mr Elliot had been the retarding weight, the doubt, the torment.  That had begun to operate in the very hour of first meeting her in Bath; that had returned, after a short suspension, to ruin the concert; and that had influenced him in everything he had said and done, or omitted to say and do, in the last four-and-twenty hours.  It had been gradually yielding to the better hopes which her looks, or words, or actions occasionally encouraged; it had been vanquished at last by those sentiments and those tones which had reached him while she talked with Captain Harville; and under the irresistible governance of which he had seized a sheet of paper, and poured out his feelings.

Of what he had then written, nothing was to be retracted or qualified.  He persisted in having loved none but her.  She had never been supplanted.  He never even believed himself to see her equal.  Thus much indeed he was obliged to acknowledge:  that he had been constant unconsciously, nay unintentionally; that he had meant to forget her, and believed it to be done.  He had imagined himself indifferent, when he had only been angry; and he had been unjust to her merits, because he had been a sufferer from them.  Her character was now fixed on his mind as perfection itself, maintaining the loveliest medium of fortitude and gentleness; but he was obliged to acknowledge that only at Uppercross had he learnt to do her justice, and only at Lyme had he begun to understand himself.  At Lyme, he had received lessons of more than one sort.  The passing admiration of Mr Elliot had at least roused him, and the scenes on the Cobb and at Captain Harville’s had fixed her superiority.

In his preceding attempts to attach himself to Louisa Musgrove (the attempts of angry pride), he protested that he had for ever felt it to be impossible; that he had not cared, could not care, for Louisa; though till that day, till the leisure for reflection which followed it, he had not understood the perfect excellence of the mind with which Louisa’s could so ill bear a comparison, or the perfect unrivalled hold it possessed over his own.  There, he had learnt to distinguish between the steadiness of principle and the obstinacy of self-will, between the darings of heedlessness and the resolution of a collected mind.  There he had seen everything to exalt in his estimation the woman he had lost; and there begun to deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment, which had kept him from trying to regain her when thrown in his way.