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But he was confident that he should soon be rich:
full of life and ardour, he knew that he should soon have a ship,
and soon be on a station that would lead to everything he wanted.
He had always been lucky; he knew he should be so still.
Such confidence, powerful in its own warmth, and bewitching in
the wit which often expressed it, must have been enough for Anne;
but Lady Russell saw it very differently. His sanguine temper,
and fearlessness of mind, operated very differently on her.
She saw in it but an aggravation of the evil. It only added a
dangerous character to himself. He was brilliant, he was headstrong.
Lady Russell had little taste for wit, and of anything approaching
to imprudence a horror. She deprecated the connexion in every light.

Such opposition, as these feelings produced, was more than
Anne could combat. Young and gentle as she was, it might yet
have been possible to withstand her father's ill-will,
though unsoftened by one kind word or look on the part of her sister;
but Lady Russell, whom she had always loved and relied on, could not,
with such steadiness of opinion, and such tenderness of manner,
be continually advising her in vain. She was persuaded to believe
the engagement a wrong thing: indiscreet, improper, hardly capable
of success, and not deserving it. But it was not a merely selfish caution,
under which she acted, in putting an end to it. Had she not
imagined herself consulting his good, even more than her own,
she could hardly have given him up. The belief of being prudent,
and self-denying, principally for his advantage, was her chief consolation,
under the misery of a parting, a final parting; and every consolation
was required, for she had to encounter all the additional pain of opinions,
on his side, totally unconvinced and unbending, and of his feeling himself
ill used by so forced a relinquishment. He had left the country
in consequence.

A few months had seen the beginning and the end of their acquaintance;
but not with a few months ended Anne's share of suffering from it.
Her attachment and regrets had, for a long time, clouded every
enjoyment of youth, and an early loss of bloom and spirits
had been their lasting effect.

More than seven years were gone since this little history
of sorrowful interest had reached its close; and time had
softened down much, perhaps nearly all of peculiar attachment to him,
but she had been too dependent on time alone; no aid had been given
in change of place (except in one visit to Bath soon after the rupture),
or in any novelty or enlargement of society. No one had ever
come within the Kellynch circle, who could bear a comparison with
Frederick Wentworth, as he stood in her memory. No second attachment,
the only thoroughly natural, happy, and sufficient cure,
at her time of life, had been possible to the nice tone of her mind,
the fastidiousness of her taste, in the small limits of the society
around them. She had been solicited, when about two-and-twenty,

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