With what indignation such a letter as this must
be read by Miss Dashwood, may be imagined. Though aware,
before she began it, that it must bring a confession
of his inconstancy, and confirm their separation for ever,
she was not aware that such language could be suffered
to announce it; nor could she have supposed Willoughby
capable of departing so far from the appearance of every
honourable and delicate feeling--so far from the common
decorum of a gentleman, as to send a letter so impudently
cruel: a letter which, instead of bringing with his desire
of a release any professions of regret, acknowledged no
breach of faith, denied all peculiar affection whatever--
a letter of which every line was an insult, and which
proclaimed its writer to be deep in hardened villainy.

She paused over it for some time with indignant
astonishment; then read it again and again; but every
perusal only served to increase her abhorrence of the man,
and so bitter were her feelings against him, that she
dared not trust herself to speak, lest she might wound
Marianne still deeper by treating their disengagement,
not as a loss to her of any possible good but as an
escape from the worst and most irremediable of all
evils, a connection, for life, with an unprincipled man,
as a deliverance the most real, a blessing the most important.

In her earnest meditations on the contents of the letter,
on the depravity of that mind which could dictate it,
and probably, on the very different mind of a very different
person, who had no other connection whatever with the affair