The Admiral has his faults, but he is a very good man,
and has been more than a father to me. Few fathers would
have let me have my own way half so much. You must
not prejudice Fanny against him. I must have them love
one another."
Mary refrained from saying what she felt, that there could
not be two persons in existence whose characters and manners
were less accordant: time would discover it to him;
but she could not help _this_ reflection on the Admiral.
"Henry, I think so highly of Fanny Price, that if I could
suppose the next Mrs. Crawford would have half the reason
which my poor ill-used aunt had to abhor the very name,
I would prevent the marriage, if possible; but I know you:
I know that a wife you _loved_ would be the happiest
of women, and that even when you ceased to love, she would
yet find in you the liberality and good-breeding of
a gentleman."
The impossibility of not doing everything in the world to
make Fanny Price happy, or of ceasing to love Fanny Price,
was of course the groundwork of his eloquent answer.
"Had you seen her this morning, Mary," he continued,
"attending with such ineffable sweetness and patience to
all the demands of her aunt's stupidity, working with her,
and for her, her colour beautifully heightened as she
leant over the work, then returning to her seat to finish
a note which she was previously engaged in writing
for that stupid woman's service, and all this with such
unpretending gentleness, so much as if it were a matter
of course that she was not to have a moment at her
own command, her hair arranged as neatly as it always is,
and one little curl falling forward as she wrote, which she
now and then shook back, and in the midst of all this,
still speaking at intervals to _me_, or listening,
and as if she liked to listen, to what I said.
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