Elliot had at least _roused_ him, and the scene on the
Cobb, and at Captain Harville's, had fixed her superiority. In his
preceding attempts to attach himself to Louisa Musgrove (the attempts of
anger and pique), he protested that he had continually felt the
impossibility of really caring for Louisa, though till _that day_, till
the leisure for reflection which followed it, he had not understood the
perfect excellence of the mind with which Louisa's could so ill bear
comparison; or the perfect, the unrivalled hold it possessed over his
own. There he had learnt to distinguish between the steadiness of
principle and the obstinacy of self-will, between the darings of
heedlessness and the resolution of a collected mind; there he had seen
everything to exalt in his estimation the woman he had lost, and there
had begun to deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment,
which had kept him from trying to regain her when thrown in his way. From
that period to the present had his penance been the most severe. He had
no sooner been free from the horror and remorse attending the first few
days of Louisa's accident, no sooner had begun to feel himself alive
again, than he had begun to feel himself, though alive, not at liberty.
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