I know how he is likely to be influenced.
Let Sir Thomas trust to his honour and compassion, and it
may all end well; but if he get his daughter away, it will
be destroying the chief hold.'"
After repeating this, Edmund was so much affected that Fanny,
watching him with silent, but most tender concern,
was almost sorry that the subject had been entered
on at all. It was long before he could speak again.
At last, "Now, Fanny," said he, "I shall soon have done.
I have told you the substance of all that she said.
As soon as I could speak, I replied that I had not
supposed it possible, coming in such a state of mind
into that house as I had done, that anything could
occur to make me suffer more, but that she had been
inflicting deeper wounds in almost every sentence.
That though I had, in the course of our acquaintance,
been often sensible of some difference in our opinions,
on points, too, of some moment, it had not entered my
imagination to conceive the difference could be such as she
had now proved it. That the manner in which she treated
the dreadful crime committed by her brother and my sister
(with whom lay the greater seduction I pretended not to say),
but the manner in which she spoke of the crime itself,
giving it every reproach but the right; considering its ill
consequences only as they were to be braved or overborne
by a defiance of decency and impudence in wrong; and last
of all, and above all, recommending to us a compliance,
a compromise, an acquiescence in the continuance of the sin,
on the chance of a marriage which, thinking as I now thought
of her brother, should rather be prevented than sought;
all this together most grievously convinced me that I had
never understood her before, and that, as far as related
to mind, it had been the creature of my own imagination,
not Miss Crawford, that I had been too apt to dwell on
for many months past.
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