It was not in Miss Crawford's power to talk Fanny into any real
forgetfulness of what had passed. When the evening was over, she went
to bed full of it, her nerves still agitated by the shock of such an
attack from her cousin Tom, so public and so persevered in, and her
spirits sinking under her aunt's unkind reflection and reproach. To be
called into notice in such a manner, to hear that it was but the
prelude to something so infinitely worse, to be told that she must do
what was so impossible as to act; and then to have the charge of
obstinacy and ingratitude follow it, enforced with such a hint at the
dependence of her situation, had been too distressing at the time to
make the remembrance when she was alone much less so, especially with
the superadded dread of what the morrow might produce in continuation
of the subject.

Miss Crawford had protected her only for the time; and
if she were applied to again among themselves with all the
authoritative urgency that Tom and Maria were capable of, and Edmund
perhaps away, what should she do? She fell asleep before she could
answer the question, and found it quite as puzzling when she awoke the
next morning. The little white attic, which had continued her
sleeping-room ever since her first entering the family, proving
incompetent to suggest any reply, she had recourse, as soon as she was
dressed, to another apartment more spacious and more meet for walking
about in and thinking, and of which she had now for some time been
almost equally mistress. It had been their school-room; so called till
the Miss Bertrams would not allow it to be called so any longer, and
inhabited as such to a later period. There Miss Lee had lived, and
there they had read and written, and talked and laughed, till within
the last three years, when she had quitted them. The room had then
become useless, and for some time was quite deserted, except by Fanny,
when she visited her plants, or wanted one of the books, which she was
still glad to keep there, from the deficiency of space and
accommodation in her little chamber above: but gradually, as her value
for the comforts of it increased, she had added to her possessions, and
spent more of her time there; and having nothing to oppose her, had so
naturally and so artlessly worked herself into it, that it was now
generally admitted to be hers.