Fanny checked her thoughts as well as she could, but she was near to thinking that Sir Thomas was quite unkind, both to her aunt and to herself.

As for the main subject of the letter, there was nothing in that to soothe irritation. She was almost vexed into displeasure and anger against Edmund.

“There is no good in this delay,” said she. “Why is not it settled? He is blinded, and nothing will open his eyes; nothing can, after having had truths before him so long in vain. He will marry the charming vampire—though I have no notion how that perversion against all Laws of God and nature shall be managed, a clergyman conjoined[29] with a demon—and be poor and miserable, and possibly bitten and eventually undead himself! God grant that her influence does not destroy him, or make him cease to be respectable!”

She looked over the letter again. “‘So very fond of me!’ Hah! ’tis nonsense all. She loves nobody but herself and her brother. ‘Her friends leading her astray for years!’ She is quite as likely to have led them astray, and made a nice meal of it, too.

“They have all, perhaps, been corrupting one another. But if they are so much fonder of her than she is of them, she is the less likely to have been hurt, except by their flattery. ‘The only woman in the world whom he could ever think of as a wife.’ I firmly believe it—and despair. It is an attachment to govern his whole life. Accepted or refused, his heart is wedded to her eternally. ‘The loss of Mary is the loss of Crawford and Fanny.’ Edmund, you do not know me. The families would never be connected if you did not connect them! Oh! write, write. Finish it already, this torture. Let there be an end! Fix, commit, condemn yourself.”

But such sensations were too much like resentment to linger in Fanny. She was soon more softened and sorrowful. His warm regard, his kind expressions, his confidential treatment, touched her strongly. He was only too good to everybody. It was a letter, in short, which she hated, yet needed as a precious thing.