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.




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