fore she began it, that it
must bring a confession of his inconstancy, and confirm their
separation for ever, she was not aware that such language could be
suffered to announce it; nor could she have supposed Willoughby
capable of departing so far from the appearance of every honourable
and delicate feeling--so far from the common decorum of a gentleman,
as to send a letter so impudently cruel: a letter which, instead of
bringing with his desire of a release any professions of regret,
acknowledged no breach of faith, denied all peculiar affection
whatever;--a letter of which every line was an insult, and which
proclaimed its writer to be deep in hardened villainy.

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. Jennings's chariot, which she knew had not been ordered
till one. Determined not to quit Marianne, though hopeless of
contributing, at present, to her ease, she hurried away to excuse
herself from attending Mrs. Jennings, on account of her sister being
indisposed. Mrs. Jennings, with a thoroughly good-humoured concern for
its cause, admitted the excuse most readily, and Elinor, after seeing
her safe off, returned to Marianne, whom she found attempting to rise
from the bed, and whom she reached just in time to prevent her from
falling on the floor, faint and giddy from a long want of proper rest
and f