Meanwhile Elinor is ...

Marianne has been doing her Ophelia routine, sitting around moping, playing favourite songs over and over again, getting morally self-righteous.

This last is an interesting part of the Ophelia sensibility--an extreme intolerance for injustice in the world. Neither Austen nor Shakespeare connects the dots on this but it is no doubt a function of projecting one's own feelings of having been unjustly treated onto the whole world. The need for personal vindication after having been treated badly by someone who was supposed to love us makes us see everything in terms of the innocent trampled by the unjust.

This never occurred to me before now typing this, but I was like that once about twenty years ago now.

Anyway, what of Elinor? Oddly enough for those who believe that this is a book about too much sensibility versus too much sense, Elinor now begins a slow and steady evolution towards more sense. That is to say, she becomes even less like her sister and her mother.

We get our first hint of this when Willoughby's perfidy is generally known and Elinor has to deal with the well-meaning but unhelpful responses of her friends. After noting that the coolness and distance of Lady Middleton is easier to bear than the effusive support of others, Austen observes that Elinor "was sometimes worried down by officious condolence to rate good-breeding as more indispensable to comfort than good-nature."

It's the reluctant acceptance of good breeding that is telling here. If we have taken Elinor to be a binary opposite to Marianne, this should not be. What we are seeing in these chapters is not the two girls moving closer together but two girls who were once to one side of divide—one more extreme than the other—both finding their understanding of the world challenged. One, Marianne, is digging in her heels and refusing to give up her former vies, while Elinor is moving more easily into the sense camp.

When the uncomfortable meeting between Lucy, Edward and Elinor takes place, Elinor is firmly determined to hide her feelings and let only her good nature show:

But Elinor had more to do; and so anxious was she, for his sake and her own, to do it well, that she forced herself, after a moment's recollection, to welcome him, with a look and manner that were almost easy and almost open; and another struggle, another effort still improved them. She would not allow the presence of Lucy, nor the consciousness of some injustice towards herself, to deter her from saying that she was happy to see him, and that she had very much regretted being from home, when he called before in Berkeley Street. She would not be frightened from paying him those attentions which, as a friend and almost a relation, were his due, by the observant eyes of Lucy, though she soon perceived them to be narrowly watching her. 

And then Marianne walks into the room and is nothing but good-natured and is absolutely useless to everyone raising everyone's level of discomfort.

Elinor's increased focus on sense does not come at the expense of her sensibilities but she is rather cool in her responses. I particularly love her response to the opinions of Mr. Robert Ferrars: "Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition."