Page:Austen - Mansfield Park, vol. I, 1814.djvu/321



I was not in Miss Crawford's power to talk Fanny into any real forgetfulness of what had passed.—When the evening was over, she went to bed full of it, her nerves still agitated by the shock of such an attack from her cousin Tom, so public and so persevered in, and her spirits sinking under her Aunt's unkind reflection and reproach. To be called into notice in such a manner, to hear that it was but the prelude to some thing so infinitely worse, to be told that she must do what was so impossible as to act; and then to have the charge of obstinacy and ingratitude, follow it, enforced with such a hint at the dependance of her situation, had been too distressing at the time, to make the remembrance when she was alone much less so,—especially with the superadded dread of what the morrow might produce in continuation of VOL. I.