She paused over it 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.
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