She felt worn when they arrived at Barton, and there was no peace to be had over tea. Mrs. Jennings was in fine form, and Lady Middleton was constantly calling her mother to order. There was no relief in this, however, for Lady Middleton was governed, not by any sensitivity to the feelings of others, but by a pedantic set of social rules which admitted no variation. Mrs. Dashwood found her rigidity and repetition more exhausting than the jolly coarseness of the inoffendable Mrs. Jennings. That good lady was hospitable to a fault. Her way of making visitors feel at home was to tease them and supply them liberally with snippets of gossip. When one was in spirits, her sallies were often amusing, but it was a hard thing to bear them after a long walk and a dispiriting self-examination.
Mrs. Dashwood felt herself smile and heard herself making all the conversation that civility required, but she was at an infinite distance from the room and everyone in it, watching the petty and pointless interactions with pity and disgust. What fools they all were, condemned to this life of tea and tedium which was taking place with the most mundane of variations in every manor and townhouse and cottage in England! The ring on her left hand gleamed dully, a niggling reminder that once she had felt something. If she could be alone, entirely alone, perhaps she would be able to cry out in pain, but she was always surrounded by eyes, and ears. Even her private bedroom in the cottage, with its paper-thin walls, offered no respite. She thought with longing of the forbidding masonry of a convent cell. What bliss to be locked away forever!
Then somehow, finally, dinner was at an end, and Marianne, as always, stalked directly to the pianoforte. Even here there was no isolation, for Sir John exclaimed through every song, and Lady Middleton repeated at every pause that she had given up music upon her marriage, you know. Only Colonel Brandon, seated next to her in the corner, was silent, and mercifully did not turn his face toward her when, at last, the music gave her cover to sneak her handkerchief to her eyes.
“See how the Colonel dotes on Miss Marianne’s playing!” Mrs. Jennings bellowed across the room. “We’ll make a lover of you yet, sir!”
1 comment:
I like how you can see some traces of Marianne in Mrs. Dashwood, not as developed or perhaps developed a little differently.
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