how Catherine just *insists* on getting the whole thing with Henry out in the open and resolved (“But, Mr. Tilney, why were you less generous than your sister? . . . .I am sure by your look, when you came into the box, you were angry”) when a more experienced, guarded person would have accepted Henry's conventional reassurances, even at the cost of some lingering ill-feeling between them.

One of the charming things about Catherine, I think, is how unguarded (how "artless," in JA's words) she is about revealing her real feelings; this makes for a potent contrast with the quintessentially artful Isabella, who is constantly putting on a show of one kind or another. Of course, this artlessness of Catherine's is (here and elsewhere) one of the things that charms Henry; in this scene, with her naive insistence, she inadvertently makes it entirely obvious that the reason she's so anxious to clear everything up is that she has a huge crush on him, and what Henry could resist that? The irony, of course, is that Catherine's artlessness -- her lack of any strategy or manipulation -- turns out to be a far more effective way to play the husband-hunting game than Isabella's calculation.