The thing about a bad proposal is that it requires more craft than a good one.

A good proposal needs only sincerity, reasonable timing, and the wit not to say anything that cannot be unsaid. These are modest requirements. Most men of ordinary feeling can meet them without preparation. A bad proposal, one engineered to fail, to produce a clean refusal without injury to either party’s dignity, and without creating the kind of scene that gets retold at dinner tables for the next twenty years…this is a genuinely difficult undertaking, and I approached it as such.

The difficulty was Elizabeth specifically. A woman of less perception could be managed with blunt instruments: excessive condescension, a sufficiently detailed accounting of her family’s deficiencies, the sort of proposal that is really a list of the proposer’s virtues with a question appended. Elizabeth Bennet would see through blunt instruments. She would see through them and she would be amused by them and she would tell Charlotte Lucas about it in precise and entertaining detail, and Charlotte Lucas would notice it alongside everything else she was noticing about me, and I did not need Charlotte Lucas to have more material.

What I needed was a refusal that Elizabeth would find so entirely characteristic that it would confirm rather than complicate everything she thought she knew about me. A refusal she could laugh about with Charlotte and then put down and not think about again.

I had given the matter three days’ careful preparation.

Mrs. Bennet had arranged the morning with her customary lack of subtlety. The sitting room faced the front of the house, its two windows overlooking the approach from the lane. The furniture was arranged for domestic occupation rather than formal reception: a sofa near the better light, several chairs drawn close enough for conversation, a small table that still held the workbaskets the younger Miss Bennets had abandoned when they were so hastily sent out on errands. Elizabeth sat by the window with a book that I suspected had been read aloud to occupy her sisters while they sewed. The book now lay closed in her lap, which told me she had been warned and was bracing herself. Mrs. Bennet had withdrawn to attend to some matter of household management that apparently required her presence in the hallway just beyond the door. Mr. Bennet remained secure behind his library door, which he would not open for anything less than a criminal assault.

She was about to endure something she would find both distasteful and beneath her. The fact that she had no idea it would be over quickly was, I recognized, both necessary and somewhat unfair.

I began.

“Miss Elizabeth — I trust you will forgive the intrusion upon your morning, for I am sensible that a young woman of your — that is to say, your — the claims upon your time are, I have no doubt, considerable, and yet I find myself impelled — compelled — by feelings which I have — that is to say, which have —”

I let this run for somewhat longer than was strictly necessary, watching her expression move through irritation, resolve, and the quality of a woman mentally composing the account she would give Jane and Charlotte afterward. Good. That was the right register entirely.

“Miss Elizabeth,” I said, arriving at last at the form of address I had determined to use throughout for maximum effect, “I have been most sensible of your — that is, almost from the moment of my arrival at Longbourn I have distinguished you above your sisters, and it is the sincere wish of my — the hope, I should say, the earnest hope — that you will do me the very great honor —”

Here I introduced a pause just long enough to be excruciating.

“— of accepting my hand in marriage.”

There it was. On the table. I watched her open her mouth and close it again, the refusal already formed and then reconsidered. She was, I noted with approval, too intelligent to simply blurt it out, she was choosing her words.

I did not give her the words.

“I am aware,” I said, pressing forward with the momentum of a man who has not noticed that anything is wrong, “that the situation of your family — that is, the entailment, which I need not remind you places certain — and which my own position, as the heir in question, renders somewhat — I am aware, I say, that a young woman of your circumstances must feel the advantage of such a connection most keenly. Lady Catherine herself — her ladyship has not explicitly — that is to say, I have every reason to expect that Lady Catherine, upon being informed of my — of our —”

I watched Elizabeth’s expression move from controlled refusal to genuine irritation. Excellent. Irritation would sharpen the rejection into something clean and final rather than something careful and apologetic.

“Furthermore,” I said, as if the previous sentence had reached a satisfactory conclusion, “I am not unaware that my situation at Hunsford is one which many young women would find — that the parsonage has been lately improved, as I believe I have mentioned — and that the society of the neighborhood, while perhaps not equal to what — though Lady Catherine’s condescension in receiving the family at Rosings would of course —”

“Mr. Collins.”

Her voice had an edge I had not quite anticipated, not raw anger, but the precise, controlled irritation of a woman who has been patient long enough and has decided that patience is no longer serving anyone.

“Mr. Collins, I thank you for the honor you do me.”

Here it was.

“However,” she said, “I must decline your proposal, and I must ask you to believe that no considerations of…”

She stopped. Started again. She was trying to be kind. With her mother in all probability listening at the door, this was most unwise. Her kindness would only convince her mother that our marriage was still a possibility. She would try to bully Elizabeth into changing her mind, and try to bully me into proposing again. Mrs. Bennet would not succeed on either account, but she would be relentless. Her maneuverings would be far more oppressive than whatever jobations she would produce if she knew Elizabeth had rejected me completely.

“I cannot accept your offer,” Elizabeth said finally, with the clarity of a woman who has decided that directness is the only remaining mercy. “I am sorry for it.”

She stopped again. The pity in her expression was genuine. It stung me, and without that sting, I do not know if I would have found the nerve to goad this kindly, clever lady into saying what was necessary.

“Miss Elizabeth,” I said, with the warmth of a man who has entirely misunderstood the situation, “I am aware that young ladies of your — that it is customary — that a first refusal does not always — that is to say, it is the most becoming modesty in a young woman to —”

The expression that crossed her face at this was not irritation. It was something sharper and less comfortable, the expression of a person who has tried to do something decent and found their decency not merely rejected but misread entirely.

“It is not modesty,” she said. “It is a sincere refusal. I wish you every happiness, Mr. Collins, and I hope you will believe me when I say — I am quite decided.”

She looked at me directly when she said it. She was disgusted with me, and that stung me as well, although it was no more than I had earned.

I held my expression in place: the politely wounded incomprehension of a man who cannot quite account for what has happened. I did not let her see that I had heard her perfectly.

“I shall,” I said, after a suitable pause, “endeavor to hope that time and reflection may —”

“They will not,” said Elizabeth Bennet.

She said it quietly, but not so quietly that her mother could not hear it, listening behind the door.

I withdrew. I was careful to step heavily as I approached the door, so that Mrs. Bennet would be warned and have time to escape from her post behind it.

In the hallway, I took a breath and reassembled my expression into the appropriate configuration: a man mildly bewildered but not seriously wounded, perfectly prepared to transfer his affections to the next available candidate, precisely the Mr. Collins that everyone in Hertfordshire had decided I was.

The morning had gone as planned.

Or mostly as planned. Elizabeth Bennet had refused me, cleanly and finally, as I had arranged for her to do. But she had tried to be kind, and I had been obliged to be cruel. I chose not to think about it.

The morning was clear and cold. I adjusted my hat and went out onto the gravel path. The approach from house to lane was perhaps thirty yards, open ground with the borders cut back for winter. Anyone standing at the gate could see the house entire, and be seen in turn.

Charlotte Lucas was there.

She was standing perhaps ten yards from the gate into the lane, in full view of the sitting room windows. She was not pretending to examine the shrubbery. She was not pretending anything. She was simply standing in the morning light, watching the door through which I had just come, and when I appeared she looked at me with that systematic, cataloguing attention and did not look away.

I stopped.

We regarded each other across ten yards of gravel path.

“Mr. Collins,” she said. “I wonder if you might spare a few minutes.”

It was not quite a question. It reminded me of one of Lady Catherine’s orders, but more delicately issued.