Avoiding Lord Orville's Notice — Evelina, Or, the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World

After Villars's kind, heart-piercing letter, Evelina keeps her room, unable and unwilling to see Lord Orville. By morning the stay will last a few days more, so she tries to appear as usual and still avoid him. At breakfast his sight confuses her as if he already knew the letter. She hardly answers, sits at a distance for the first time, and retires when the meal ends. Selwyn brings a phaeton invitation and says an airing in his carriage could not fail to revive her. Evelina refuses. Selwyn then tells Orville that she prefers a walk alone with her, by way of variety. He meets her in the hall, would take her hand, and she turns away with a slight curtsy.

At the pump-room a murmur of "That's she" turns every eye. She pulls her hat over her face. Young men follow her and the Miss Watkins, talking of her blush, her downcast eye, and the mind she will not speak. Rain comes. They offer their arms, and she runs into Sir Clement Willoughby, who has spent the morning hunting her lodgings. Compliments, and verses left in the room, push her under Selwyn's look into promising him the dance. On the way home she thinks only of how capricious the change must look to Orville. In the garden the two men change colour at the sight of each other.

Willoughby's notice is pointed and public. Orville's stays gentle, so that even flattery does not distress her. He asks whether she knew whom she would meet at the Wells. She cannot explain without breaking the silence she set herself. She had meant to stay home, and she still comes down dressed for the assembly. He offers his hand. She names Sir Clement, and he does not speak to her again that afternoon. At the rooms Willoughby presses a folded paper into her hand while Orville watches. The lines cannot be shown in the house, because Lady Louisa is among the ladies supposed to be rejected.

Evelina tells Villars she has no doubt Macartney wrote them. She dances only to stop the compliments. They leave early, because Lady Louisa must be first out. Orville's reception is grave and cold, and he lets Willoughby sit between them. Through the night she asks the man who formed her to compose a mind in which feeling and duty are at war, and in which the wish to do right has already cost her peace.