It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves.
We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us.
You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.”
“Granting your assertion that the world does all this so soon for men (which, however, I do not think I shall grant), it does not apply to Benwick. He has not been forced upon any exertion. The peace turned him on shore at the very moment, and he has been living with us, in our little family circle, ever since.”
“True,” said Anne, “very true; I did not recollect; but what shall we say now, Captain Harville? If the change be not from outward circumstances, it must be from within; it must be nature, man’s nature, which has done the business for Captain Benwick.”
“No, no, it is not man’s nature. I will not allow it to be more man’s nature than woman’s to be inconstant and forget those they do love, or have loved. I believe the reverse. I believe in a true analogy between our bodily frames and our mental; and that as our bodies are the strongest, so are our feelings; capable of bearing most rough usage, and riding out the heaviest weather.”
“Your feelings may be the strongest,” replied Anne, “but the same spirit of analogy will authorise me to assert that ours are the most tender.
Man is more robust than woman, but he is not longer lived; which exactly explains my view of the nature of their attachments.
Nay, it would be too hard upon you, if it were otherwise.
You have difficulties, and privations, and dangers enough to struggle with.
You are always labouring and toiling, exposed to every risk and hardship.
Your home, country, friends, all quitted. Neither time, nor health, nor life, to be called your own. It would be hard, indeed”
(with a faltering voice), “if woman’s feelings were to be added to all this.”
Persuasion
139
“We shall never agree upon this question,” Captain Harville was beginning to say, when a slight noise called their attention to Captain Wentworth’s hitherto perfectly quiet division of the room.
It was nothing more than that his pen had fallen down; but Anne was startled at finding him nearer than she had supposed, and half inclined to suspect that the pen had only fallen because he had been occupied by them, striving to catch sounds, which yet she did not think he could have caught.
“Have you finished your letter?” said Captain Harville.
“Not quite, a few lines more. I shall have done in five minutes.”
“There is no hurry on my side. I am only ready whenever you are.
I am in very good anchorage here,” (smiling at Anne,) “well supplied, and want for nothing. No hurry for a signal at all. Well, Miss Elliot,”
(lowering his voice,) “as I was saying we shall never agree, I suppose, upon this point. No man and woman, would, probably.
But let me observe that all histories are against you–all stories, prose and verse. If I had such a memory as Benwick, I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.”
“Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story.
Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”
“But how shall we prove anything?”
“We never shall. We never can expect to prove any thing upon such a point.
It is a difference of opinion which does not admit of proof.
We each begin, probably, with a little bias towards our own sex; and upon that bias build every circumstance in favour of it which has occurred within our own circle; many of which circumstances (perhaps those very cases which strike us the most) may be precisely such as cannot be brought forward without betraying a confidence, or in some respect saying what should not be said.”