Sense and Sensibility (Signet Classics)

by Jane Austen

To treat her with unkindness, to speak of her slightingly is no atonement to Marianne, nor can I suppose it a relief to your own conscience.”

“Yes, you have certainly removed something-a little. You have proved yourself, on the whole, less faulty than I had believed you. You have proved your heart less wicked, much less wicked. But I hardly know-the misery that you have inflicted-I hardly know what could have made it worse.”

Extravagance and vanity had made him cold-hearted and selfish. Vanity, while seeking its own guilty triumph at the expense of another, had involved him in a real attachment which extravagance, or at least its offspring, necessity, had required to be sacrificed. Each faulty propensity, in leading him to evil, had led him likewise to punishment.

The attachment from which against honour, against feeling, against every better interest he had outwardly torn himself, now, when no longer allowable, governed every thought; and the connection, for the sake of which he had, with little scruple, left her sister to misery, was likely to prove a source of unhappiness to himself of a far more incurable nature.

I know we shall be happy. I know the summer will pass happily away. I mean never to be later in rising than six, and from that time till dinner I shall divide every moment between music and reading. I have formed my plan and am determined to enter on a course of serious study. Our own library is too well known to me to be resorted to for anything beyond mere amusement. But there are many works well worth reading at the park; and there are others of more modern production which I know I can borrow of Colonel Brandon. By reading only six hours a day, I shall gain in the course of a twelvemonth a great deal of instruction which I now feel myself to want.”

Do not, my dearest Elinor, let your kindness defend what I know your judgment must censure.

I saw in my own behaviour since the beginning of our acquaintance with him last autumn nothing but a series of imprudence towards myself and want of kindness to others. I saw that my own feelings had prepared my sufferings and that my want of fortitude under them had almost led me to the grave.

Whenever I looked towards the past, I saw some duty neglected or some failing indulged.

I, and only I, knew your heart and its sorrows; yet to what did it influence me? Not to any compassion that could benefit you or myself.

No not less when I knew you to be unhappy than when I had believed you at ease did I turn away from every exertion of duty or friendship; scarcely allowing sorrow to exist but with me, regretting only that heart which had deserted and wronged me, and leaving you, for whom I professed an unbounded affection, to be miserable for my sake.”

From you, from my home, I shall never again have the smallest incitement to move; and if I do mix in other society it will be only to show that my spirit is humbled, my heart amended, and that I can practise the civilities, the lesser duties of life, with gentleness and forbearance.

She rejoiced in his being cleared from some part of his imputed guilt; she was sorry for him; she wished him happy. But the feelings of the past could not be recalled. Nothing could restore him with a faith unbroken, a character unblemished, to Marianne. Nothing could do away the knowledge of what the latter had suffered through his means, nor remove the guilt of his conduct towards Eliza.

Reflection had given calmness to her judgment and sobered her own opinion of Willoughby’s deserts; she wished, therefore, to declare only the simple truth, and lay open such facts as were really due to his character without any embellishment of tenderness to lead the fancy astray.

His expensiveness is acknowledged even by himself, and his whole conduct declares that self-denial is a word hardly understood by him. His demands and your inexperience together on a small, very small income, must have brought on distresses which would not be the less grievous to you from having been entirely unknown and unthought of before.

And how little could the utmost of your single management do to stop the ruin which had begun before your marriage? —Beyond that, had you endeavoured, however reasonably, to abridge his enjoyments, is it not to be feared that instead of prevailing on feelings so selfish to consent to it, you would have lessened your own influence on his heart and made him regret the connection which had involved him in such difficulties?”

“ The whole of his behaviour,” replied Elinor, “from the beginning to the end of the affair has been grounded on selfishness. It was selfishness which first made him sport with your affections; which afterwards, when his own were engaged, made him delay the confession of it, and which finally carried him from Barton. His own enjoyment, or his own ease, was in every particular his ruling principle.”

“At present,” continued Elinor, “he regrets what he has done. And why does he regret it? Because he finds it has not answered towards himself. It has not made him happy. His circumstances are now unembarrassed. He suffers from no evil of that kind; and he thinks only that he has married a woman of a less amiable temper than yourself.

But does it thence follow that had he married you he would have been happy? The inconveniences would have been different. He would then have suffered under the pecuniary distresses which, because they are removed, he now reckons as nothing.

He would have had a wife of whose temper he could make no complaint, but he would have been always necessitous, always poor; and probably would soon have learned to rank the innumerable comforts of a clear estate and good income as of far more impor...

She feared that under this persuasion she had been unjust, inattentive, nay, almost unkind to her Elinor; that Marianne’s affliction, because more acknowledged, more immediately before her, had too much engrossed her tenderness and led her away to forget that in Elinor she might have a daughter suffering almost as much, certainly with less self-provocation and greater fortitude.

But he was now married, and she condemned her heart for the lurking flattery which so much heightened the pain of the intelligence.

suffice to say half that was to be said of the past, the present, and the future; for though a very few hours spent in the hard labour of incessant talking will dispatch more subjects than can really be in common between any two rational creatures, yet with lovers it is different. Between them no subject is finished, no communication is even made, till it has been made at least twenty times over.

They were brought together by mutual affection with the warmest approbation of their real friends; their intimate knowledge of each other seemed to make their happiness certain; and they only wanted something to live upon.

The whole of Lucy’s behaviour in the affair, and the prosperity which crowned it, therefore, may be held forth as a most encouraging instance of what an earnest, an unceasing attention to self-interest, however its progress may be apparently obstructed, will do in securing every advantage of fortune, with no other sacrifice than that of time and conscience.

Marianne Dashwood was born to an extraordinary fate. She was born to discover the falsehood of her own opinions, and to counteract by her conduct her most favourite maxims. She was born to overcome an affection formed so late in life as at seventeen, and with no sentiment superior to strong esteem and lively friendship, voluntarily to give her hand to another—and that other, a man who had suffered no less than herself under the event of a former attachment, whom, two years before, she had considered too old to be married, and who still sought the constitutional safeguard of a flannel waistcoat!

But so it was. Instead of falling a sacrifice to an irresistible passion, as once she had fondly flattered herself with expecting, instead of remaining even forever with her mother and finding her only pleasures in retirement and study, as afterwards in her more calm and sober judgment she had determined on, she found herself at nineteen submitting to new attachments, entering on new duties, placed in a new home, a wife, the mistress of a family, and the patroness of a village.

Colonel Brandon was now as happy as all those who best loved him believed he deserved to be; in Marianne he was consoled for every past affliction; her regard and her society restored his mind to animation and his spirits to cheerfulness; and that Marianne found her own happiness in forming his was equally the persuasion and delight of each observing friend.