Toward the end of Jane Austen's novel Persuasion, protagonist Anne Elliot has a short conversation with Captain Harville, an acquaintance. The conversation is about the constancy of love, and is rather playful, all the more so because the man whom Anne loves—Captain Wentworth—is within earshot. Anne does not know whether Captain Wentworth can hear her, but the possibility that he might lends the conversation special significance. The gist of the conversation is the following: Anne laments what she understands to be a peculiar (and often unfortunate) power of women: that they will keep loving even when "existence or when hope is gone."