come to a crisis. Marianne, after sending Willoughby letter after letter, which remain unanswered, meets him at length, only to learn that he is on the eve of marriage to a young lady of large property, and, as her grief and misery are past all restraint, Elinor now ascertains what she had sometimes feared, but thought impossible, that Willoughby had never definitely spoken of love to Marianne, and that the romantically imprudent girl, pursuing her theory of complete confidence in anyone she loved, had given the most outspoken marks of devotion to a man who had never told her he cared for her. The truth must now be known to all their friends, who are by this time gathered in London, and Elinor's chief anxiety is to keep all the comments from reaching her sister.
Lady Middleton expressed her sense of the affair about once every day, or twice, if the subject occurred very often, by saying, "It is very shocking indeed!" and, by means of this continual, though gentle vent, was able, not only to see the Miss Dashwoods from the first without the smallest emotion, but very soon to see them without recollecting a word of the matter; and having thus supported the dignity of her own sex, and spoken her decided censure of what was wrong in the other, she thought herself at liberty to attend to the interest of her own assemblies, and therefore determined, though rather against the opinion of Sir John, as Mrs. Willoughby would at once be a woman of elegance and fortune, to leave her card with her as soon as she married.
"Sir John could not have thought it possible, a man of whom he had always had such reason to think well! such a good-natured fellow! he did not believe there was a bolder rider in England. It was an unaccountable
