Elizabeth had succeeded at sixteen to all that was possible of her mother’s rights and consequence; and being very handsome, and very like himself, her influence had always been great, and they had gone on together most happily.  His two other children were of very inferior value.  Mary had acquired a little artificial importance by becoming Mrs. Charles Musgrove; but Anne, with an elegance of mind and sweetness of character which must have placed her high with any people of real understanding, was nobody with either father or sister.  To Lady Russell, indeed, she was a most dear and highly valued god-daughter, favourite and friend.  Lady Russell loved them all; but it was only in Anne that she could fancy the mother to revive again.

It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before; and, generally speaking, it is a time of life at which scarcely any charm is lost.  It was so with Elizabeth, still the same handsome Miss Elliot that she had begun to be thirteen years ago; and Sir Walter might be excused, therefore, in forgetting her age, or, at least, be deemed only half a fool for thinking himself and Elizabeth as blooming as ever, amid the wreck of the good looks of everybody else.

Elizabeth did not quite equal her father in personal contentment.  She had the consciousness of being nine-and-twenty to give her some regrets and some apprehensions.  Moreover, she had been disappointed by the heir-presumptive, the very William Walter Elliot, Esq., whose rights had been so generously supported by her father.  Soon after Lady Elliot’s death, Sir Walter had sought Mr. Elliot’s society, and had introduced him to Elizabeth, who was quite ready to marry him.  But despite the assiduity of the baronet, the younger man let the acquaintance drop, and married a rich woman of inferior birth, for whom, at the present time (the summer of 1814), Elizabeth was wearing black ribbons.

Anne, too, had had her disappointment.  Eight years ago, before she had lost her bloom, when, in fact, she had been an extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste and feeling added, she had fallen in love with Captain Wentworth, a young naval officer who had distinguished himself in the action off Domingo; but her father and Lady Russell had frowned upon the match, and, persuaded chiefly by the arguments of the latter that it would be prejudicial to the professional interests of her lover, who had still his fortune to make, she had rather weakly submitted to have the engagement broken off.  But though he had angrily cast her out of his heart, she still loved him, having in the meantime rejected Charles Musgrove, who subsequently consoled himself by marrying her sister Mary.  So that when her father’s embarrassed affairs compelled him to let Kellynch Hall to Admiral Croft, an eminent seaman who had fought at Trafalgar, and had happened to marry a sister of Captain Wentworth, she could not help thinking, with a gentle sigh, as she walked along her favourite grove:  “A few months more, and he, perhaps, may be walking here.”