The words bring a more cordial, more natural smile to the gentleman’s lips, though he suggests a little sarcastically that he and his sister were at least much obliged to her for wishing them a pleasant walk. She had looked back on purpose.
After all, the lingering air of being piqued, which Henry Tilney cannot conceal, is the best evidence of Catherine’s dawning influence.
But the stupid girl takes his words literally. “Indeed, I did not wish you a pleasant walk; I never thought of such a thing; but I begged Mr. Thorpe so earnestly to stop; I called out to him as soon as ever I saw you. Now, Mrs. Allen, did not——Oh! you were not there. But indeed I did; and if Mr. Thorpe would only have stopped, I would have jumped out and run after you.”
“Is there a Henry in the world,” exclaims Jane Austen, “who could be insensible to such a declaration?” Perhaps not. Yet we are tempted to wonder if Jane Austen had ever listened to the sarcastic old song—
“The fruit that will fall without shaking
Is rather too mellow for me;”
or to that valuable warning in wooing—
“When a woman is willing,
A man can but look like a fool.”
If all girls were as quickly captivated as Catherine Morland, what would become of the wooing—the pursuit—the probation, during which Elizabeth Barrett Browning asserts a man may be content to be treated “worse than dog or mouse” when it is but the prelude to the girl’s becoming his for ever?