For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” This took several drafts, mostly to clarify a somewhat muddled conversation about whether Mrs. Jennings’ gatherings were orderly or not, and delete named references to a couple of characters who are still a little bit before their formal introduction. And also, get Claude to quote Cowper directly. In terms of interesting Claude innovations, the idea of the Willoughby analogue kind of winding Marianne up and watching her go was new to me. It’s not entirely in line with the source novel, where he tends to parrot her literary opinions, but I decided I liked it here, and left it in. I reworded the overly vague last line slightly and reworked Edward’s thoughts about his father to be somewhat differently expressed than the last time the subject came up.

A Literary Conversation

The front parlor of the Palmiere house on Rue Toulouse was not quite large enough for the number of people Mrs. Jennings had arranged within it, which Mrs. Jennings appeared to consider one of its more agreeable qualities. She had a gift for compression: the right eight or ten people in a room that seated six comfortably produced, in her experience, better conversation than any number of people in a room that seated them all. Éléonore had come to suspect she was correct.

The afternoon had begun as these afternoons generally did, with coffee and the particular New Orleans light that came through shuttered windows in long pale bars, striping the cypress floor and the edge of the settee where Céleste sat with Charlotte Palmiere. The smell of chicory was strong and bitter and not unpleasant, and someone had brought a plate of pralines that had been cooling since morning and had reached a stage of crystalline perfection. Marianne had taken the chair nearest the window. Alejandro Villarreal had taken the chair nearest Marianne.

Edward was standing near the bookcase.

This was not, Éléonore told herself, the first thing she had noticed upon entering the room. It was, however, the thing she had continued to notice while appearing to notice other things, which amounted to much the same result.

The discussion had begun with Mrs. Jennings, which was where most things in this circle began. She had read, or had begun to read, or had been told about by Charlotte, a novel recently arrived from the north, and she wished to know what everyone thought of it. The question of whether everyone had read it was secondary to Mrs. Jennings’s conversational purposes, which were principally to get the room talking and then to listen with great satisfaction while it did.

Alejandro had an opinion. He generally had an opinion, and he offered it with the ease of a man accustomed to having his opinions received as contributions rather than interrogated as arguments. The novel was, he said, affecting. The heroine’s suffering was rendered with considerable feeling. The prose had moments of real beauty.

“Moments,” Marianne repeated, with the particular brightness she brought to a word she intended to contest.

“Several moments,” Alejandro said, smiling at her. “Sustained in places.”

“I thought it sustained throughout.” Marianne set down her coffee cup. “I think to call it affecting is to undervalue it considerably. It is not merely affecting. It asks something of the reader. It requires that you feel what the heroine feels, not simply observe that she feels it.”

“That is a high requirement,” Alejandro said. “Not every reader will meet it.”

“Then those readers have not truly read it.”

Alejandro laughed, which was the response least likely to satisfy Marianne and most likely to be offered. Éléonore, who had genuinely read the novel and had views about it, watched her sister with the divided attention of someone enjoying the argument and worrying about the arguer simultaneously. Marianne was at her most vivid in conversations like this, her cheeks warm and her hands in motion, and Alejandro was very good at producing that vividness in her and then sitting back to appreciate it, which was not quite the same thing as engaging with what she actually said.

“Miss Dashwood.” Edward had moved from the bookcase. He was addressing Éléonore, not Marianne, which she registered and set aside. “You have not offered an opinion.”

“I have been forming one.”

“I am told that is a habit of yours.”

“By whom?”

“Mrs. Jennings mentioned it as a compliment.” He settled into the chair angled toward hers, the one that the younger of the Acier sisters had vacated ten minutes ago in favor of a position nearer the pralines and the conversation Céleste was conducting with Charlotte. “She said you were the sort of person who thinks before she speaks, which she considers rarer than it ought to be and more valuable than most people recognize.”

Éléonore glanced at Mrs. Jennings, who was attending to Marianne and Alejandro’s exchange with the pleased expression of someone who had arranged a particularly successful theatrical entertainment. “She is very kind.”

“She is also, I think, correct.” Edward said this without the softening inflection of a compliment, which made it land differently than a compliment would have. He said it as an observation, the way he said most things, and Éléonore received it as such and found she preferred it.

“The novel,” she said, returning them to safer ground. “Since you asked.”

“Since I asked.”

“I think Marianne is right that it asks something of the reader. I am less certain she is right that readers who fail to meet the requirement have not truly read it.” She paused, organizing the thought. “A reader may feel the full weight of what the author has done and still find it, in places, overextended. Feeling does not require the suspension of judgment. They are not in competition.”

Edward was quiet for a moment. It was the quality of quiet she had come to recognize as consideration rather than absence, the pause of someone who was actually thinking about what she had said rather than preparing what he intended to say next.

“Marianne would argue,” he said, “that the suspension of judgment is precisely what the novel requires. That bringing critical apparatus to a work of feeling is a way of keeping it at arm’s length.”

“Marianne would not be entirely wrong.”

“But.”

“But I am not certain that arm’s length is always a failure of engagement. Sometimes it is the position from which you can see the whole of something rather than only the part of it that is pressing against you.” She looked toward her sister, who was now quoting something at Alejandro with great conviction and one hand outstretched. “Marianne reads from the inside. She is inside the novel while she is reading it. I think she experiences things I do not experience. I also think she occasionally misses things I can see.”

“And which would you rather be?” Edward asked. “The reader inside or the reader outside?”

It was a genuine question; she could tell by the way he asked it, without the rhetorical tilt that would have indicated he already had an answer he preferred. She thought about it seriously, which he seemed to expect.

“I do not think I am capable of being the reader inside,” she said at last. “I have tried. The habit of noticing how a thing is constructed will not leave me alone long enough. But I have sometimes wondered what it would be like to read without that habit. Whether certain books would be different books entirely.”

“I think they would,” Edward said. He said it with something that was not quite wistfulness, but was adjacent to it.

Across the room, Alejandro had reclaimed the thread of the conversation from Marianne, gently and skillfully, in the way of a man who enjoyed a lively exchange up to the point where he was no longer directing it. He was speaking now about Havana, about the literary circles he had encountered there, about a poet whose name he dropped with the confidence of someone for whom names were social instruments. Marianne was listening, her earlier animation softened into the particular attentive look she wore when Alejandro spoke of his own experiences, which was a look that worried Éléonore in ways she had not yet found the precise words for.

“He is very charming,” Edward said, quietly, following the direction of her gaze.

“Yes,” Éléonore said.

A pause. The light through the shutters had shifted, the afternoon advancing, and the stripes across the cypress floor had moved a foot toward the far wall. The pralines were nearly gone.

“My father,” Edward said, in the tone he used when he arrived at something he had intended to say and had been circling toward, “had a library. Not a large one. He was not a man of great learning, but he read carefully and he remembered what he read. After he died I went through it. I read the books he had marked.” He looked at the bookcase across the room, which held Mrs. Jennings’s collection, a cheerful miscellany of novels and travel writing and what appeared to be a complete set of almanacs going back fifteen years. “There was a copy of Cowper with his notes in the margins. Very small handwriting, very precise. I felt that I understood him better after that.”

Éléonore did not immediately respond. She understood this was not an invitation for condolence, which would be both late and beside the point. It was something else: a disclosure offered with the same plainness he had brought to his observation about New Orleans, the kind of thing said not to produce an effect but because it was true and the occasion seemed to call for truth.

“What did he mark?” she asked.

Edward looked at her. Something shifted briefly in his expression, a quality she could not name precisely but recognized as the look of someone who had expected the sympathetic murmur and the change of subject and had received instead the question that required an answer.

“The winter evening passage. Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round. ” He said the lines quietly, not performing them. “He had underlined the last of it twice: the cup that cheers but not inebriates. And written beside it in that small hand: this is enough. ” A pause. “I have not been entirely certain what he meant by it. Whether it was consolation or conclusion.”

“Perhaps both,” Éléonore said.

“Perhaps both,” he agreed.

The room had grown a little louder; Mrs. Jennings had rejoined the central conversation, which had moved from the novel to a ball being planned for the following month, and Charlotte was describing the musicians who had been engaged with an enthusiasm that suggested she had been largely responsible for their selection. Marianne was laughing at something, genuinely this time, and Alejandro was watching her laugh with an expression that Éléonore observed from across the room and found, on reflection, more difficult to read than she would have liked.

She turned back to Edward, who had not turned to look at the rest of the room.

“You should come to Mrs. Jennings’s on Thursday,” she said. “She is proposing to read aloud from the novel. The discussion will be different, at least.”

“Different how?”

“She will have had several more days to decide what she thinks of it. Whether that produces more order or less I cannot say with confidence.”

“Having now seen Mrs. Jennings conduct two of these afternoons,” Edward said, “I am not certain order is what she is principally after.”

“No,” Éléonore said. “I think she is after the thing that occasionally emerges from the absence of it.” She glanced toward their hostess, who was now pressing a second praline on one of her guests with the irresistible insistence of someone who considered refusal a social error. “She has a talent for putting people in the same room and then standing back. What happens after that is not, strictly speaking, her responsibility.”

“And yet it generally seems to come out as she intended.”

“Yes,” Éléonore said. “It generally does.”

She stood, because Céleste was signaling to her across the room with the small precise gesture that meant they would be leaving within the quarter hour. “But it has been, despite that, worth the afternoon.”

She said it plainly, as he had said things to her, without the softening inflection of a social nicety. He received it accordingly, and the small change in his expression confirmed that he understood the distinction.

She went to collect her mother. At the door, settling her shawl in the late afternoon warmth, she did not look back at the bookcase where Edward was standing again, hands in his pockets, watching them go. She did not look back, and she was aware of not looking back in the way that meant she was thinking about it, which was not, she told herself, particularly useful information.

The street outside smelled of river and woodsmoke and the faint sweetness of something being cooked three doors down, and Marianne was already talking about the ball, and Éléonore listened and answered and thought, carefully and against her better judgment, about small handwriting in the margins of a book, and what it might mean to find small pleasures enough.