“Very bad—though it might have been worse.—Playing a most dangerous game. Too much indebted to the event for his acquittal.—No judge of his own manners by you.—Always deceived in fact by his own wishes, and regardless of little besides his own convenience.—Fancying you to have fathomed his secret. Natural enough!—his own mind full of intrigue, that he should suspect it in others.—Mystery; Finesse—how they pervert the understanding! My Emma, does not everything serve to prove more and more the beauty of truth and sincerity in all our dealings with each other?”
Emma agreed to it, and with a blush of sensibility on Harriet’s account, which she could not give any sincere explanation of.
“You had better go on,” said she.
He did so, but very soon stopped again to say, “the pianoforte! Ah! That was the act of a very, very young man, one too young to consider whether the inconvenience of it might not very much exceed the pleasure. A boyish scheme, indeed!—I cannot comprehend a man’s wishing to give a woman any proof of affection which he knows she would rather dispense with; and he did know that she would have prevented the instrument’s coming if she could.”
After this, he made some progress without any pause. Frank Churchill’s confession of having behaved shamefully was the first thing to call for more than a word in passing.
“I perfectly agree with you, sir,”—was then his remark. “You did behave very shamefully. You never wrote a truer line.” And having gone through what immediately followed of the basis of their disagreement, and his persisting to act in direct opposition to Jane Fairfax’s sense of right, he made a fuller pause to say, “This is very bad.—He had induced her to place herself, for his sake, in a situation of extreme difficulty and uneasiness, and it should have been his first object to prevent her from