The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 6. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

When Jane was well enough to be moved we sent to Longbourn for the carriage, and on the morning of our going it was late.

It is a peculiar kind of suspension, that hour — bonneted, gloved, the boxes brought down, the carriage not come; no longer a guest, not yet gone; the household's claims on you ended and the road's not begun. Jane was making her farewells to Mr. Bingley, which took some time and required no help from me. I had taken up a book to have somewhere to put my eyes, and it was the book that began it.

"You read a great deal, Miss Bennet," said Miss Bingley, pausing over my shoulder in the voice a lady keeps for the things she does not admire. "I never knew a young woman so devoted to it. You will have worn your eyes out before you are thirty."

"They have served me well enough so far," I said, and turned the page.

"I cannot comprehend the taste myself. There is so much else a woman ought to be about." She had drifted, in the saying of it, to where Mr. Darcy stood, which was the true heading of all her drifting. "We agreed only yesterday, did we not, that there are scarcely half a dozen women in all England one could call truly accomplished."

"You both proposed and carried the motion," said Mr. Darcy. "I listened."

"Then disagree with me now, if you are able. A woman must have her French and her Italian, her instrument, her drawing, her dancing; she must net a purse and paint a screen and cross a room as though she had been born walking. I know six who manage the whole of it. Name me a seventh."

"I would add to your list of accomplishments before I named any ladies."

"Add what? I had thought myself thorough."

"You have given her every art and left her nothing to think with. To all the rest she should join the improvement of her mind by extensive reading."

I closed the book on my finger.

"Then I no longer wonder that you know only six," I said. "I wonder that you know any. You have described a woman who does not exist, Mr. Darcy, and asked the room to be ashamed of not resembling her."

Miss Bingley laughed the brief laugh she kept for conversations that had stopped going her way, discovered that the carriage must surely be visible by now, and removed to the window to look for it. What was left of the talk was Mr. Darcy's and mine, with no one by to perform for, and it came out truer than such things commonly do at the end of a visit.

"You think the condition an unfair one," he said.

"I think it convenient. Make the last of the tests how much a woman has read, and you may fail whichever woman you please, for no one has read enough to satisfy a man who has resolved not to be satisfied."

"You mistake me. The quantity is nothing." He had turned from the window to attend to me, which I was not prepared for. "I have known great readers who carried away from a hundred volumes nothing but the habit of having opened them. To read widely is easy. To read deeply is another thing, and rarer, and it will not be counted off on the fingers the way Miss Bingley counts her accomplishments."

I had come down that morning quite comfortable in my opinion of him, and here he was obliging me to revise it upward, which is a service one does not thank a man for. I had got as far as "Then we are to understand—" when the carriage was announced.

There is no graceful way to finish a sentence to a man across a morning-room when one's mother's horses are stamping in the drive. We did not finish it. He handed Jane in, and then me, with a correctness that admitted of no complaint and no warmth either, and we drove away, Jane talking happily of how kind they had all been while I tried not to argue with her.

By the first milestone I had completed my sentence to Mr. Darcy in three different ways, each cleverer than the last, and had no one to spend them on. They kept. Such things keep a long time, I have found, and gather interest.