Chapter 10: Cecilia Asks the Direct Question

The morning was clear and cold, the kind of cold that arrived in December without apology, and Cecilia had been walking for twenty minutes before she admitted to herself that she had not come out for the air.

She had come out because the note to Thornfield Abbey had been sent at eight o'clock by the stable boy, and the response — politely worded, precisely dated, proposing Thursday at two o'clock in the afternoon — had arrived before ten, and the interval between now and Thursday was approximately fifty-two hours, which she had attempted to fill with Tacitus and found Tacitus entirely insufficient. Walking was, at minimum, metabolically honest in a way that sitting at a writing desk pretending to read was not.

The Meryton road was quiet at this hour. A cart had passed going northward, and Mrs. Long's housemaid at a distance, and otherwise Cecilia had the lane to herself — the hedgerows winter-stripped on either side, the mud beginning to firm at the edges where the frost had not quite gone, the sky a pale and non-committal grey that declined to express an opinion about anything.