land.

As Elinor was neither musical, nor affecting to be so, she made no
scruple of turning her eyes from the grand pianoforte, whenever it
suited her, and unrestrained even by the presence of a harp, and
violoncello, would fix them at pleasure on any other object in the
room. In one of these excursive glances she perceived among a group of
young men, the very he, who had given them a lecture on
toothpick-cases at Gray's. She perceived him soon afterwards looking
at herself, and speaking familiarly to her brother; and had just
determined to find out his name from the latter, when they both came
towards her, and Mr. Dashwood introduced him to her as Mr. Robert
Ferrars.

He addressed her with easy civility, and twisted his head into a bow
which assured her as plainly as words could have done, that he was
exactly the coxcomb she had heard him described to be by Lucy. Happy
had it been for her, if her regard for Edward had depended less on his
own merit, than on the merit of his nearest relations! For then his
brother's bow must have given the finishing stroke to what the
ill-humour of his mother and sister would have begun. But while she
wondered at the difference of the two young men, she did not find that
the emptiness of conceit of the one, put her out of all charity with
the modesty and worth of the other. Why they _were_ different, Robert
exclaimed to her himself in the course of a quarter of an hour's
conversation; for, talking of his brother, and lamenting the extreme
_gaucherie_ which he really believed kept him from mixing in proper
society, he candidly and generously attributed it much less to any
natural deficiency, than to the misfortune of a private education;
while he himself, though probably without any particular, any material
superiority by nature, merely from the advantage of a public school,
was as well fitted to mix in the world as any other man.

"Upon my soul," he added, "I believe it is nothing more; and so I
often tell my mother, when she is grieving about it. 'My dear Madam,'
I always say to her, 'you must make yourself easy. The evil is now
irremediable, and it has been entirely your own doing. Why would you
be persuaded by my uncle, Sir Robert, against your own judgment, to
place Edward under private tuition, at the most critical time of his
life? If you had only sent him to Westminster as well as myself,
instead of sending him to Mr. Pratt's, all this would have been
prevented.' This is the