Persuasion

'it's over! it's over!' She repeated to herself again, and again, in nervous gratitude. 'The worst is over!'
Mary talked, but she could not attend. She had seen him. They had met. They had been once more in the same room!
Soon, howover, she began to reason with herself, and try to be feeling less. Eight years, almost eight years had passed, since all had been given up. How absurd to be resuming the agitation which such an interval had banished into distance and indistinctness! What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals -all, all must be compromised in it; and oblivion of the past - how natural, how certain too! It included nearly a third part of her own life.

Jane Austen (1775-1817), Persuasion