Sense and Sensibility: The Wild and Wanton Edition (Crimson Romance) by Austen Jane & Lane Lauren

Author:Austen, Jane & Lane, Lauren [Austen, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: romance, wild and wanton
Publisher: Crimson Romance
Published: 2013-03-17T13:00:00+00:00

With what indignation such a letter as this must be read by Miss Dashwood, may be imagined. Though aware, before she began it, that it must bring a confession of his inconstancy, and confirm their separation for ever, she was not aware that such language could be suffered to announce it; nor could she have supposed Willoughby capable of departing so far from the appearance of every honourable and delicate feeling — so far from the common decorum of a gentleman, as to send a letter so impudently cruel: a letter which, instead of bringing with his desire of a release any professions of regret, acknowledged no breach of faith, denied all peculiar affection whatever; — a letter of which every line was an insult, and which proclaimed its writer to be deep in hardened villainy.

Though Marianne had never expressly confided in Elinor the nature of her private encounters with Mr. Willoughby, Elinor knew that much more had passed between them than what Willoughby alluded to in this letter. She was certain they had been intimate, and she was certain that mutual affections had been expressed. There was no other account for the dreamy glaze in her sister’s eye after an afternoon spent with Willoughby, no other explanation for the endearments, private smiles, and interminable flirting Elinor witnessed with her own two eyes during all those days and evenings spent at Barton. Willoughby was playing a nasty trick indeed, pretending nothing at all had happened, that it had all been a figment of Marianne’s imagination!

She paused over the letter for some time with indignant astonishment; then read it again and again; but every perusal only served to increase her abhorrence of the man, and so bitter were her feelings against him, that she dared not trust herself to speak, lest she might wound Marianne still deeper by treating their disengagement, not as a loss to her of any possible good but as an escape from the worst and most irremediable of all evils, a connection, for life, with an unprincipled man, as a deliverance the most real, a blessing the most important.

In her earnest meditations on the contents of the letter, on the depravity of that mind which could dictate it, and probably, on the very different mind of a very different person, who had no other connection whatever with the affair than what her heart gave him with every thing that passed, Elinor forgot the immediate distress of her sister, forgot that she had three letters on her lap yet unread, and so entirely forgot how long she had been in the room, that when on hearing a carriage drive up to the door, she went to the window to see who could be coming so unreasonably early, she was all astonishment to perceive Mrs. Jennings’s chariot, which she knew had not been ordered till one. Determined not to quit Marianne, though hopeless of contributing, at present, to her ease, she hurried away to excuse herself from attending Mrs. Jennings, on account of her sister being indisposed.

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