Quotation from: Sense and Sensibility

Written by: Jane Austen


He addressed her with easy civility, and twisted
his head into a bow which assured her as plainly as
words could have done, that he was exactly the coxcomb
she had heard him described to be by Lucy. Happy had
it been for her, if her regard for Edward had depended
less on his own merit, than on the merit of his nearest
relations! For then his brother's bow must have given
the finishing stroke to what the ill-humour of his mother
and sister would have begun. But while she wondered
at the difference of the two young men, she did not find
that the emptiness of conceit of the one, put her out
of all charity with the modesty and worth of the other.
Why they WERE different, Robert exclaimed to her himself
in the course of a quarter of an hour's conversation;
for, talking of his brother, and lamenting the extreme
GAUCHERIE which he really believed kept him from mixing
in proper society, he candidly and generously attributed it
much less to any natural deficiency, than to the misfortune
of a private education; while he himself, though probably
without any particular, any material superiority
by nature, merely from the advantage of a public school,
was as well fitted to mix in the world as any other man.

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