“‘My dearest Harriet!’ cried Emma, putting her hands before her face, and jumping up, ... ‘And so you actually put this piece of court-plaister by for his sake,’ ... and secretly she added to herself, ‘Lord bless me! when should I ever have thought of putting by in cotton a piece of court-plaister that Frank Churchill had been pulling about! I never was equal to this.’
“‘Here,’ resumed Harriet, turning to her box again, ‘here is something still more valuable,—I mean that has been more valuable,—because this is what did really once belong to him, which the court-plaister never did.’
“Emma was quite eager to see this superior treasure. It was the end of an old pencil, the part without any lead.
“‘This was really his,’ said Harriet. ‘Do not you remember one morning? ... I forget exactly the day ... he wanted to make a memorandum in his pocket-book; it was about spruce beer ... and he wanted to put it down; but when he took out his pencil there was so little lead that he soon cut it all away, and it would not do, so you lent him another, and this was left upon the table as good for nothing. But I kept my eye upon it; and, as soon as I dared, caught it up, and never parted with it again from that moment.’...
“‘My poor dear Harriet! and have you actually found happiness in treasuring up these things?’
“‘Yes, simpleton as I was!—but I am quite ashamed of it now, and wish I could forget as easily as I can burn them. It was very wrong of me, you know, to keep any remembrances after he was married. I knew it was—but had not resolution enough to part with them.’”
This is pure comedy!
In Jane Austen’s day there certainly was an openness in the arrangements about marriage that jars on our more reticent minds. Of course it is undeniable that at that time a girl’s only vocation, unless she happened to be a genius, was marriage, but the way in which suitability as to means and position were frequently considered as of all importance, and love merely as a secondary consideration, is slightly perturbing. Jane Austen’s high ideal of marriage must have been rarer then than at the present time. Perhaps the best example of the shameless discussion of the mariage de convenance in the novels is the interview between Elinor Dashwood and her brother, when Colonel Brandon has shown some slight attention to her. Her brother begins by asking—
“‘Who is Colonel Brandon? Is he a man of fortune?’
“‘Yes, he has very good property in Dorsetshire.’