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“Well, Fanny, and how do you like Miss Crawford now?” said Edmund the next day, after thinking some time on the subject himself. “How did you like her yesterday?”
Fanny couldn’t know that this was a serious conversation and topic that laid heavily on Edmund. She thought this was another polite conversation for the sake of speaking and so she didn’t contemplate the subject thoroughly. “Very well – very much. I like to hear her talk. She entertains me; and she is so extremely pretty, that I have great pleasure in looking at her.” And she did, Miss Mary Crawford was indeed a pleasant companion (even though it might have been because she never paid any disapproving attention to Fanny).
“It is her countenance that is so attractive. She has a wonderful play of feature! But was there nothing in her conversation that struck you, Fanny, as not quite right?”
She now remembered “not the first favourite in the world”. It wasn’t proper to say so, but now Fanny felt like a hypocrite. She remembered the relief she felt when her uncle told them he was departing for Antigua, how ungrateful she was, how unable to feel grief. Sir Thomas, who had done so much for her and her brothers, and who was gone perhaps never to return! And she saw him go without a tear. How shamefully insensible she was! She and Miss Mary Crawford weren’t really that different in this matter. They were such ungrateful creatures. So even though she felt awful for denouncing her own vices in someone else, she spoke her mind.
“Oh, yes! She ought not to have spoken of her uncle as she did. I was quite astonished. An uncle with whom she has been living so many years, and who, whatever his faults may be, is so very fond of her brother, treating him, they say, quite like a son. I could not have believed it!” She was talking about herself more than about Miss Crawford, which is why Edmund’s next words were so painful to her.
“I thought you would be struck. It was very wrong; very indecorous.”
And Fanny was wondering if they were still talking about Miss Crawford or if this was about her. Was Edmund lecturing her on right behaviour, did he thinks she is so indecorous, that he must speak up on the subject? Even though he was too polite to say this to her directly? She was so very ashamed. One thing was knowing about her own shortcomings, but having them confirmed? By a person she loved and respected most in the world? It was too much, she couldn’t even look at Edmund, “Yes,” she said to him, “and very ungrateful, I think.”