The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 3. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

"Kitty," said my mother, the moment the breakfast things were cleared, "I want you upstairs. Lydia, go with her. Mary — your father has been asking for you."

My father had asked for nobody, and would have paid handsomely to go on asking for nobody, but Mary went. I had half risen myself when my mother fixed me where I stood.

"Lizzy, you will stay. Mr. Collins has something to say to you."

"Mr. Collins can have nothing to say to me that my sisters may not hear."

"You will stay, Lizzy. I insist upon it." And she was gone, and the door closed on the last of my sisters with the soft click of a thing that has been oiled in advance.

I should have seen it laid. I had grown up inside my mother's campaigns and could generally make out the shape of one before she had finished the first manoeuvre — and this one had been in the field for two days already. An invitation had come from Miss Bingley for Jane to dine at Netherfield, the gentlemen engaged elsewhere; and my mother, consulting the sky with the satisfaction of a woman who had read it correctly, refused Jane the carriage and sent her the three miles on the old riding horse. It came on to rain before she was halfway. Jane was kept the night, and my mother bore her triumph as she bore all her triumphs, aloud and at the table. With Mr. Bingley thus secured to her eldest daughter — for so the arithmetic already stood, in her ledger — Mr. Collins had been quietly transferred from Jane to me, and had accepted the reassignment without a flicker. A man genuinely attached to my sister might have shown some small reluctance to move the attachment overnight; he showed none, and I set it down to feelings shallow enough to be poured from one vessel to another without spilling. I had the explanation entirely backwards, but it served me for a great many months.

All of which is to say that I was alone in the breakfast-room with Mr. Collins, and the door was shut, and he was clearing his throat.

"Believe me, my dear Miss Elizabeth," he began, "that your modesty, so far from doing you any disservice, rather adds to your other perfections."

"Mr. Collins—"

"You can hardly doubt the purport of my discourse. Almost as soon as I entered the house I singled you out as the companion of my future life." He held up a hand against interruption, having evidently rehearsed the interruption as well. "But before I am run away with by my feelings, it may be advisable to state my reasons for marrying. Firstly, that it is the duty of a clergyman in easy circumstances to set the example of matrimony in his parish. Secondly, that I am convinced it will add very greatly to my happiness. And thirdly — which perhaps I ought to have mentioned earlier — that it is the express advice and recommendation of the very noble lady whom I have the honour of calling patroness."

He paused there, as a man pauses at the best prospect on his property.

"'Mr. Collins,'" he said, in what I understood to be an imitation of her ladyship, "'you must marry. A clergyman like you must marry. Choose properly. Choose a gentlewoman, for my sake; and for your own, let her be an active, useful sort of person, not brought up high, but able to make a small income go a good way. Find such a woman as soon as you can, bring her to Hunsford, and I will visit her.' Allow me to observe, my fair cousin, that the notice and kindness of Lady Catherine de Bourgh are not the least of the advantages in my power to offer."

"You are too hasty, sir," I said. "You forget that I have made no answer. Let me make it now. Accept my thanks for the compliment you are paying me. I am very sensible of the honour of your proposals, but it is impossible for me to do otherwise than decline them."

"I am not now to learn," said Mr. Collins, with a wave of the hand that forgave me everything, "that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept, when he first applies for their favour. I am therefore by no means discouraged, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere long."

"Upon my word, sir, your hope is an extraordinary one after my declaration. I am perfectly serious in my refusal."

"You would be refusing a respectable establishment. You may not be aware that it is by no means certain another offer of marriage will ever be made you. I must conclude that you mean to increase my love by suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females."

"Elegant females may plague whom they choose, sir. I am a rational creature, and I have now told you the truth three times. I shall not improve it on a fourth telling."

"You are uniformly charming!" cried Mr. Collins.

I have had occasion since to be argued with by some formidable people, and I have never again met anything so impregnable as Mr. Collins in love. There was no purchase on the man anywhere. Refusal ran off him like rain off new slate, each fresh declaration absorbed into the general proof of my delicacy; and I was driven at last from the room, having achieved nothing in a quarter of an hour but three refusals and the loss of my temper, to find my mother stationed in the hall at the exact distance the door's acoustics would have recommended to her.

What followed was loud, and most of it was addressed to me. I was a headstrong, foolish girl who did not know my own interest; I would be made to know it; she would not be crossed in this, Lizzy, she would not. It was at this point that Mr. Collins emerged from the room behind me, bewildered and embarrassed by the scene in front of him. My mother ran on, telling me that headstrong girls who refused respectable establishments might find their mothers done with them altogether. And gathering herself to deliver the decisive stroke, she flew to the library to fetch the one authority in the house who outranked her.

My father came as far as the library door and surveyed the field — my mother at full sail, Mr. Collins arranging his features into injured dignity, and me, in the middle of it, with my temper gone.

"An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth," he said. "From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do."

It was not kind to my mother, and he knew it, and he said it anyway, because the alternative was to let the thing grind on for a week; and underneath the wit, which the room received as wit, a man had taken my side. He withdrew. The door closed. My mother was left to discover, by degrees, that the matter had been decided against her in eleven seconds, and that she had carried the deciding vote to the wrong tribunal.

Mr. Collins bore his rejection with great dignity for slightly under a minute.

His equanimity restored itself with a speed I had attributed, at the time, to the shallowness of his attachment. He grew formal. He resigned his pretensions in the rounded periods of a man reading the eulogy of a connexion he had not much liked. By the time Charlotte Lucas was shown in — and she arrived, as she so often did, at the exact moment the room most wanted a sensible person in it — he had recovered enough to be gracious about my unworthiness.

Charlotte took the management of the room out of my hands without appearing to take anything at all.

"You bear it wonderfully, Mr. Collins," she said, and had him telling her of Rosings before the tea was poured. Was the park very extensive? It was. And her ladyship took an interest in the parish — in the cottagers, the school? Her ladyship's attention reached everything; Miss Lucas could scarcely conceive the minuteness of it. Charlotte said she was sure she could not, and asked another question, and another, each one a small door held open for him to walk through talking; and I was left free at the window to recover my temper, which wanted the whole of the quarter-hour. She was good at this, I told myself — at smoothing the feathers of foolish men — and I left the observation there, where it sat quietly for a fortnight before it taught me anything.

I had not been at the window long when a horse came up the drive.

It was our own riding horse, led by a Netherfield servant, and the note he carried was from Jane. She was unwell — a sore throat, a fever, a headache; nothing to alarm us, she wrote, in the careful hand of a person trying not to alarm anyone; Miss Bingley would not hear of her leaving. My mother, whose scheme had now answered beyond anything she had dared to hope, received the news with perfect serenity and observed that people did not die of trifling colds, and that Jane could be in no better hands.

I had less faith in colds that made Jane so careful about not alarming us. The carriage was not to be had — my mother wanted it later, and besides, a daughter arriving in a carriage could be sent home in one. I said I would walk. Three miles, and the lanes deep after the rain; behind me, as I went for my boots, Mr. Collins had begun explaining to Charlotte the exact degree of concern it was proper to feel for a young lady's sore throat.

I took the short way, across the south field, and arrived at Netherfield with a petticoat that had a great deal to say about the journey.

I did not know, setting out, how closely it would be read.