Persuasion

Anne visits Mrs. Smith the morning after the concert, deliberately avoiding Mr. Elliot. Mrs. Smith reads Anne's face immediately: "Your countenance perfectly informs me that you were in company last night with the person whom you think the most agreeable in the world." Anne blushes, can't speak. Mrs. Smith assumes she means Mr. Elliot and reveals she needs Anne's help with him—he could recover her late husband's West Indies property, but he's been refusing. She believes Anne will soon be engaged to Mr. Elliot and asks when she can make her request official. Anne denies everything: "I am not going to marry Mr. Elliot." Mrs. Smith, unconvinced, gently promotes the match until Anne nearly shouts: "It is not Mr. Elliot that—" She stops, blushing deeply at having implied too much, but it's enough. Mrs. Smith understands: there's somebody else. She immediately shifts gears and tells Anne the truth about Mr. Elliot: "He is a man without heart or conscience; a designing, wary, cold-blooded being, who thinks only of himself." She produces a devastating letter Mr. Elliot wrote years ago to her husband, mocking Sir Walter as "quite fool enough" to remarry, dismissing the Elliot name and title as worthless, declaring he wished his first visit to Kellynch would be "with a surveyor, to tell me how to bring it with best advantage to the hammer." He married purely for money, despised family connection, cared only for wealth. But why court the family now? Mrs. Smith explains the scheme: Mr. Elliot has grown to value the baronetcy he once scorned. When he learned Mrs. Clay might marry Sir Walter and produce an heir who would disinherit him, he rushed to Bath to prevent it—cultivating the family, watching for danger, positioning himself to interfere. His sudden devotion is pure self-interest. The kindness in his pursuit of Anne is equally calculated: once he saw her at Lyme, he added a second motive to his mission—marry Anne to secure his claim on Kellynch and block Mrs. Clay permanently. He's been cruelly negligent of Mrs. Smith, refusing to help settle her husband's estate despite being named executor, despite having been treated like a brother by the Smiths when he was poor. Anne is shaken but not surprised. She always sensed something wrong about Mr. Elliot's excessive agreeability, his perfect composure. Now she knows: it's all performance.