Ok, it's time. Let's talk about The Letter chapter. ;-)

I paid particular attention this time to Frederick's reactions to the conversations going on around him and which spurred him to write The Letter. Mrs Musgrove and Mrs Croft are talking about the evils of long engagements.

"Anne found an unexpected interest here. She felt its application to herself, felt it in a nervous thrill all over her; and at the same moment that her eyes instinctively glanced towards the distant table, Captain Wentworth's pen ceased to move, his head was raised, pausing, listening, and he turned round the next instant to give a look, one quick, conscious look at her."

Ooh! That "quick, conscious look" must have been thrilling, don't you think? Did he mean it to be, and did Anne take it to be, an acknowledgement on his part that their proposed long engagement was not so very wise?

Anne then talks to Captain Benwick, the subject of which is worth quite a long thread in itself, so I won't discuss it except for what Frederick reacts to. They talk about forgotten loves, and she says:

"It would not be the nature of any woman who truly loved."

This so beautifully mirrors Frederick's comment at the concert about how a man does not recover from such a love - "He ought not; he does not." Anne took this as hope that Frederick still loved her. And her statement above gives Frederick hope that she still loves him. Nice symmetry there.

The point at which Frederick drops his pen, and, we presume, switches from writing the letter for Harville to writing the letter to Anne, comes when Anne asserts that woman's feelings are more tender, more long-lasting than man's.

Frederick takes up pen and writes

"I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope…."