“there are several odd-looking men walking about here, who, i am told, are sailors”
finally, a letter from mary:
My dear Anne,
I make no apologies for my silence, because I know how little people think of letters in such a place as Bath.
but mary must break this self-imposed silence for some important news: fredrick and louisa’s engagement is off; she’s now set to wed captian benwick. for anne this means, as mary doesn’t fail to point out, that “this is the end, you see, of Captian Benwick’s being supposed to be an admire of” hers. anne spends a page or so wondering how this could have happened? how did benwick and lousia end up together? i mean, “their minds [are] most dissimilar!”
according to mary’s letter, books brought them together—books read together during the weeks she was confined to bed after her fall. another explanation may be the fall itself (lousia’s fall; not the other one) . . . dispositions often change after serious head-traumas.
regardless,
Anne’s heart beat in spite of herself, and brought the colour into her cheeks when she thought of Captian Wentworth unshackled and free.
the letter read, anne heads out on a walk. at the printshop window, she notices admiral croft staring at a picture . . . “I can never get by this shop without stopping.” an image of a boat on the water always captures his attention. but it’s not the aesthetic quality or the technical realism that draws croft in; he responds to the gap between his experiences of the sea and the reproduced image:
What queer fellows your fine painters must be, to think that any body would venture their lives in such a shapeless cockleshell as that. And yet, here are two gentleman . . .
