Free Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters by Ben H. Winters

thought the same, and their behaviour at all times was an illustration of their opinions.
    When he was present, she had no eyes for anyone else. Everything he did was right. Everything he said was clever. Every lobster he drew from the tank was the biggest and plumpest of lobsters. If battledore and shuttlecock formed the evening’s sport, his was the cleverest racket-hand. If reels and jigs formed the amusement, they were partners for half the time; and when obliged to separate for a couple of dances, were careful to stand together and scarcely spoke a word to anybody else. Such conduct made them of course most exceedingly laughed at; but ridicule could not shame, and seemed hardly to provoke them.
    Mrs. Dashwood entered into all their feelings with warmth; to her it was but the natural consequence of a strong affection in a young and ardent mind.
    This was the season of happiness to Marianne. The fond attachment to her former life at Norland was much softened by the charms which Willoughby’s society bestowed on her present island home.
    Elinor’s happiness was not so great. Her heart was not so much at ease, nor her satisfaction in their amusements so pure; they afforded her no companion that could make amends for what she had left behind. Neither Lady Middleton nor Mrs. Jennings could supply to her the conversation she missed; Lady Middleton was in especially dismal humour after attempting to escape back to her home country in a raft she hadpainstakingly constructed out of broom-straw and clamshells—and being recaptured two miles off the coast. As for Mrs. Jennings, she was an everlasting talker, and had already repeated her own history to Elinor three or four times; had Elinor been paying the scantest attention, she might have known very early in their acquaintance all the particulars of Mr. Jennings’s last moments, just before his head was sliced off by an enthusiastic subaltern of Sir John’s, and what he said to his wife a few minutes before he died (“Kill yourself! Kill yourself rather than suffer life with the foreign devils!”).
    In Colonel Brandon alone, of all her new acquaintance, did Elinor find a person who could in any degree claim the respect of abilities, excite the interest of friendship, or give pleasure as a companion. Willoughby was out of the question. He was a lover; his attentions were wholly Marianne’s, and a far less agreeable man might have been more generally pleasing. Colonel Brandon, unfortunately for himself, had no such encouragement to think only of Marianne. In conversing with Elinor he found the greatest consolation for the indifference, shading into revulsion, of her sister.
    Elinor’s compassion for him increased, as she had reason to suspect that the misery of disappointed love had already been known to him. This suspicion was given by some words which accidently dropped from him one evening, when they were sitting together before the bonfire, staring into its guttural embers, while the others were dancing; the dancing was more spirited than usual, attributable to a punch Sir John was serving that he called Black Devil, made from a rum so dark that no light could pass through it.
    Brandon’s eyes were fixed on Marianne, and, after a silence of some minutes, he said, with a faint smile, “Your sister, I understand, does not approve of second attachments.”
    “No,” replied Elinor, “her opinions are all romantic.”
    “Or rather, as I believe, she considers them impossible to exist.”
    “I believe she does.”
    “Well, some people believe sea witches don’t exist. Or that they don’t curse people. But they do. They really do,” remarked Colonel Brandon bitterly.
    “A few years will settle Marianne’s opinions on second marriages on the reasonable basis of common sense and observation,” Elinor said, politely passing over Brandon’s pained comment regarding his own lamentable condition. “And then they may be more easy to define and to justify than they now