“What the eye does not see, the heart does not feel. He will never know!” There is a wretched callousness in her voice, whose counterfeitness a slight shiver betrays.
“Not know! Rupert not know!”
The words, and the inflection that accompanies them, bring home to Lavinia the fact, on which she has often laughingly expatiated to her friend, of the extraordinary intuitive knowledge of her possessed by Rupert; of her absolute inability to keep one half-thought or fancy from his ken. That he should so turn over and handle the innocent trivialities of her mind and heart, has formerly been a matter of jest. Now the thought that there will be no secret place in her soul into which she can retire from him with her terrible secret, no gourd under whose shade she can sit hugging her misery undetected, breaks down the fortification of her numbness, and leaves the breach open for active conscious agony to march up and take possession. She draws her cold fingers from Mrs. Darcy’s pitying clasp, and turns upon her.
“I do not know what object you propose to yourself by putting me to this torture!” she says. “I think a person should be fully in possession of the facts of a case before she ventures to give an opinion upon it.”
“That is quite true,” replies the other, gently, too full of deep compassion for the writhing soul before her to resent either the tone or the words used; “but does it apply to me?”
“Yes,” replies Lavinia, her insensibility seeming to give way to a far more distressing and unnatural access of wild discourtesy; “yes, a hundred times yes! You have undertaken the management of my affairs without in the least understanding them. If I were to take your advice, if I were to jilt Rupert as you so shamefully suggest to me, how much the better should I be? how much the nearer——?” She stops dead short, unable to name that never-to-be-reached goal.
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean?” speaking very slowly. “I should have thought that it did not need a conjurer to discover that! I mean that I am not the only person you would have to convince!”
“What?”
“Has it never occurred to you that there may be an obstacle on his side too?” (It is plain that the possessive pronoun here does not refer to Rupert.)