Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/136

 is much anxiety for him; but, deeply as Fanny feels for the whole family, her thoughts turn most constantly to Edmund, with intense longing to know how all this will affect his prospects with Mary Crawford. Sir Thomas is equally anxious on his younger son's account, with the difference that he, seeing Edmund's attachment, and knowing of no objections to Miss Crawford herself, is earnestly desirous for Edmund's success. Fanny's feelings are more mixed.

The relations between Edmund Bertram and Mary Crawford are among the best passages in Mansfield Park, but they are given by such a multiplicity of fine touches that no extracts could do them justice. On her side there is as much attachment as worldliness and vanity have left her capacity for, held in check by a resolution never to become a clergyman's wife, but tempered by a secret conviction that her influence can prevent him from taking orders. This state of feeling produces a cat-and-mouse kind of conduct, to which Edmund submits; first, because he is in love; secondly, because he cannot understand that the sentiments she sometimes expresses are really earnest; and, finally, because he hopes in the power of her better nature to conquer the hardness and levity which he believes are only skin deep.

Miss Crawford, who is in London at the time of the elopement, has lately seemed far more encouraging than before, and asks him now to call upon her. He goes, his thoughts divided between his own hopes and his sympathy for what she must be feeling about her brother; and when he returns to Mansfield Park after the interview, Fanny hears it all. "She had met him, he said, with a serious—certainly a serious—even an agitated air; but, before he had been able to speak