Lady Catherine de Bourgh received us the following evening, in the great drawing room at Rosings. She did so, as she did most things, with the air of a woman conferring a distinction upon the unworthy. The room was designed for this effect. It had high ceilings, portraits of ancestors chosen to suggest that consequence was hereditary and abundant, and furniture of a quality that announced its own expense without apology.

I had dined here perhaps forty times and had never quite lost the awareness that the room was doing something to the people in it, pressing down on them in a way that required either submission or a very firm internal posture to resist. I submitted, visibly and with enthusiasm. This was my established practice and I saw no reason to vary it.

“Mrs. Collins,” said Lady Catherine, studying Charlotte with the eye of a woman accustomed to finding everything around her in need of improvement. “I trust the journey from Hertfordshire was not too arduous. The roads in that part of the country are, I believe, indifferent.”

“Quite comfortable, thank you, your ladyship,” said Charlotte, as unruffled as always. I admired the shape of her social mask, so much subtler than my own, and in some ways less arduous to maintain.

Lady Catherine received Charlotte’s response with the slight pause of a woman who had expected either effusion or discomfort and had encountered neither. She frowned slightly at Charlotte.

“You are Sir William Lucas’s daughter,” she said.

“I am, your ladyship.”

“He was in trade.”

“He was, your ladyship. Import, principally.” Charlotte’s tone was level, the tone of a woman stating facts. “He has been retired from it these many years.”

“Hm,” said Lady Catherine, which was not the worst thing I had heard her say to a young woman. She turned to me. “Mr. Collins, I trust the parish has not suffered in your absence.”

“Not in the least, your ladyship — that is, I am most happy to report that the affairs of Hunsford have proceeded with every — that Pyke has maintained the — that is to say, your ladyship’s generous interest in the welfare of the parish has been, as always, the foundation upon which —”

“Yes,” said Lady Catherine. “Sit down.”

We sat. Miss de Bourgh occupied her usual chair near the fire with her usual appearance of a woman present in body and elsewhere in mind. Mrs. Jenkinson hovered. The room arranged itself into its habitual configuration.

Gerard Annesley was standing near the window.

I had known he would be there. He visited Rosings with sufficient frequency that his absence would have been more remarkable than his presence. He was perhaps twenty-four, tall, square-shouldered with the kind of physical ease that comes from a lifetime of assuming rooms are arranged for one’s own comfort. He was dressed well, moved well, and had the manner of a man who had been told often enough that he was charming to have incorporated this into his understanding of himself as settled fact.

He had looked at Charlotte when we entered, and dismissed her on sight. He would not have confided in his wife if he had one, so he assumed I would not have, either. I think also that he, like Mrs. Bennet, would have called Charlotte plain, if he was asked.

He looked at me with rather more attention, the attention of a man who has been thinking about someone in their absence and has prepared something.

“Collins,” he said. “You’ve been away. The parish must have felt the lack.”

“Most kind, most kind,” I said, beaming at him with the full force of Mr. Collins’s social enthusiasm. “I confess I felt the lack myself — that is, Hertfordshire has its charms, and the occasion was a most happy one, as you see — but to return to one’s duties, to one’s parish, to her ladyship’s most gracious —”

“Indeed,” said Annesley, cutting across the flow with a smile that did not reach his eyes. “And how do you find things on your return?”

It was a question with a second question inside it. I beamed at him and said I found everything most satisfactory, most gratifying, the parish in excellent order, Pyke’s management exemplary as always, and how kind of him to enquire.

He smiled again. He had, I noted, grown somewhat more confident in the six weeks since I had left for Hertfordshire. The smile was that of a small boy passing notes behind the schoolmaster’s back.

I smiled back. Dinner was announced.

The dining room continued Rosings’s theme of excessive consequence: too large a table, too many candles, too much gilt on the frames of too many ancestral portraits.

Lady Catherine held the table, as she invariably did, conducting the conversation with the authority of a woman who considers this her natural function and the comfort of her guests a secondary consideration to the proper ordering of discourse. She had opinions about most things and shared them without significant qualification: the neighborhood, the roads, the management of estates, the regrettable tendency of the younger generation to confuse novelty with improvement. I contributed Mr. Collins’s customary stream of agreement, Charlotte contributed her pleasant composure and well-placed questions, and the evening moved along its expected channels.

Annesley was seated across from Charlotte and two places down from me, close enough that I could observe him without appearing to. He ate with appetite, contributed to the general conversation with practiced ease, and directed occasional remarks at Charlotte that were civil in form and faintly disdainful in substance. Charlotte received these remarks with the same pleasant composure she brought to everything, but her responses to them had perhaps a slight edge.

Annesley did not notice the edge. I did, and found it satisfying in a way I chose not to examine too closely.

After dinner, we returned to the drawing room. The company dispersed in the manner of these things: Lady Catherine near the fire, Miss de Bourgh in her accustomed chair beside her mother, Mrs. Jenkinson hovering as always. Charlotte took a seat near the windows. Gerard Annesley positioned himself near the side table where the decanters had been arranged. Lady Catherine caught my eye and gestured toward the far end of the room, away from the fire and the rest of the company, under the guise of enquiring after the east field drainage, which was a subject about which she had expressed intermittent concern for the better part of two years.

“The Bordeaux,” she said, in the tone she used for subjects such as this.

“March, weather permitting.”

“I was promised February.”

“Promised by whom? Annesley? If so, he has not informed the weather of his plans,” I said. “March. Possibly late February if the crossing is favorable.”

She received this with the expression she reserved for information that was correct but inconvenient. Then she was quiet for a moment, which was not her habit, and I waited.

“My late husband’s family,” she said, at last, “has always been a source of considerable satisfaction to me.”

She said it in the tone of a woman making a statement that is true in general but not always in the specific case. We were both aware that the specific case was currently standing at the other end of her drawing room helping himself to her imported brandy.

“Of course, your ladyship,” I said.

“Gerard has his grandfather’s spirit,” she said. “The late Mr. Annesley was a man of very considerable initiative. It is an admirable quality, in the right circumstances.”

“Entirely so,” I said.

“In the right circumstances,” she insisted.

She had introduced Annesley to the network because the family obligation had been real and the pressure to discharge it had come from quarters she could not easily refuse. She had done it with reluctance, I had always suspected, and she was now finding the reluctance had been well-founded, and she could not say so without acknowledging that she had made a misjudgment, which Lady Catherine de Bourgh did not do.

What she could do was stand beside the rector of Hunsford at the far end of her drawing room and talk about the east field drainage and her late husband’s family’s initiative and trust that I would understand what she meant.

I understood it. I also understood that she was not, and would not be, authorizing anything. The way she retreated behind the language of family feeling told me that much.

“The drainage,” I said, “will be seen to before the autumn, your ladyship. You have my word.”

She gave me a small nod that had nothing to do with drainage.

“Good,” she said. “That will be all.”

We returned to the company.

Charlotte was in conversation with Miss de Bourgh, which surprised me sufficiently that I paused in the doorway for a moment. Miss de Bourgh was not generally in conversation with anyone. She received conversation directed at her with a distant politeness that discouraged its continuation. Charlotte appeared to have found some approach that had produced a different result: Miss de Bourgh was speaking, quietly but with an animation I had not previously observed in her, and Charlotte was listening with the whole attention she brought to things she found genuinely interesting.

I took a chair near enough to observe without interrupting.

Annesley was at the far end of the room, not quite talking to anyone, which meant he was watching the room. I watched him watch the room and thought about what Lady Catherine had said and had not said, and thought about the Bordeaux, and thought about the east field drainage which genuinely did require attention before the autumn, and thought about Charlotte drawing out Miss de Bourgh in a corner of the Rosings drawing room on her first evening in Kent as naturally as if she had been doing it for years.

The evening concluded without incident. In the carriage back to the parsonage, Charlotte was quiet for a moment, looking at the dark road through the window. The night was cold and clear, the interior of the carriage lit only by the faint glow of the carriage lamps when we passed something pale enough to reflect them.

“Did you know that Miss de Bourgh writes children’s books?” Charlotte said.

“I did not.”

“She would like very much to have them published, but her mother does not approve. Is there any way that Lady Catherine might be persuaded?”

I shook my head gently. “Not at present.”

“But if Lady Catherine had a particularly delicate problem for you to solve…?”

“Possibly then,” I admitted.

“Mr. Annesley is considerably less observant than he believes himself to be.”

“Indeed.”

Charlotte was quiet again for a moment. “Lady Catherine,” she said, “is very careful about what she will and will not see.”

“That is the most accurate description of her ladyship I have yet heard.”

Charlotte smiled slightly. It was a small expression, but genuine, the brief satisfaction of a woman whose judgment has been confirmed by someone whose opinion she has reason to value. Men of her own age, I suspected, rarely agreed so vigorously with her assessments.

We said nothing more on the carriage ride home.