The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 7. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

"—and after all my kindness to her!" was the first thing my mother said to us, through the drawing-room door, before our bonnets were off. "Sitting in my parlour week after week, drinking my tea, and all the while — Jane! Lizzy! You are come home at last, and you will never guess what that sly Lucas creature has done."

We could not guess. My mother had the pleasure of telling us, three times over before either of us had found a chair: Mr. Collins was to marry Charlotte Lucas.

It had been settled while we were at Netherfield, in the space of a few days, with the quiet dispatch of a transaction both parties understood. Sir William had already called to announce it in form — we had passed him in the lane, in fact, bowing to our carriage out of his own with a ceremony I had set down at the time to his being Sir William, and understood now to have been the bow of an ambassador returning from a successful treaty. The thing was done. We had missed the whole of it; which is a way of saying I never saw my friend decide. I only came home and found the decision standing in the room, fully grown, with its hat on.

"She has stolen him," said my mother. "There is no other word. Stolen him out of this very house, where he was as good as promised — and you may well look at the floor, Lizzy, for if a certain young lady had not been so monstrous clever about her own interest, it would be her wedding clothes we were discussing this day instead of Charlotte Lucas's, who I may say will look very ill in white, being so brown."

"Then she has done me the double service," I said, "of taking Mr. Collins and sparing the family the spectacle."

"Oh! you may laugh. You will laugh the day they turn us all out of Longbourn, I suppose, you and Jane both, with your father hardly cold in his grave!"

My father, applied to in the library as the final court of the matter, came as far as the door with his finger in his book. He found great satisfaction, he said, in the reflection that Charlotte Lucas, whom he had been used to think tolerably sensible, was as foolish as his wife and more foolish than his daughter. Then he went back in and was heard from no more on the subject; and my mother, twice widowed of sympathy in a single afternoon, took her grievance upstairs to Hill.

I went to Lucas Lodge that same evening. I could not have borne to have the first private words between Charlotte and me said in our house, with my mother in earshot of them.

She met me without the smallest awkwardness, which I had half feared and half hoped for, and set the tea-things between us, so that we each had something to do with our hands.

"You have heard," she said.

"From my mother. At some length."

"I can imagine the length." She measured the tea. "You have come to talk me out of it."

"I have come to hear it from you."

"Then hear it, and have done." She sat down across from me. "I am not romantic, Eliza. I never have been; you have always known it of me, and thought a little the better of yourself for being otherwise."

I opened my mouth and she went on over me, mild as milk.

"You do think so, and I have never minded it in you. But I have no fortune and no beauty, and I have been a charge on my father long enough. Mr. Collins can give me a home of my own and a respectable place in the world, and I should be a fool to want more than is to be had. I am not a fool."

"He is—" I began, and stopped, because there was no end to that sentence that was not unkind.

"He is ridiculous," said Charlotte. "I know it better than you do; I have had the advantage of hearing him recover from you. I shall have the whole of his mind by heart within a fortnight, and there will not be a great deal to learn. But I am marrying his house and his living and the entail that brings him Longbourn one day. His conversation I shall merely have to bear, and I would rather bear it in a home of my own than go without the home for the sake of a wit he does not possess."

I cast about for the thing to say and found that every objection I owned was a luxury. That she could not respect him. That she deserved better; and the word died before I could speak it, for better was no part of what the world had laid out for a gentlewoman of seven-and-twenty without a hundred pounds to her name. We both knew the nature of the world we lived in. Only one of us was troubling to be honest about it that evening.

"You are very quiet," she said. "It does not become you."

"I am trying not to say a thing I shall be sorry for."

"Say it. I would sooner have it now than read it in your face every time we meet."

"Only that I hope you will not regret your choice."

She smiled at that — her own smile, the one she kept for true things. "There," she said. "Now we understand one another, and may drink our tea like sensible women."

And so we did. She talked on easily and I answered as I could, and under the ease of it I was sorry in a way I could not have explained to her and would not have insulted her by trying. Presently she came to the practical matters, which were her native country: the parsonage at Hunsford, the garden Mr. Collins was proud of, the great house at Rosings standing half a mile off with its patroness inside it.

"She is to be my nearest neighbour," Charlotte said, "and Mr. Collins's patroness besides, which by his account are very near the same office. She is attentive. Lady Catherine takes a strong interest in Collins's domestic arrangements. She likes to know the living is in good hands and she takes Collins's affairs as a personal concern."

She said it the way she said most things — flatly, a fact she had picked up and turned over and not yet decided where it belonged. I heard it as Charlotte counting one more item into the price of her comfortable home: a great lady's eye forever on the larder and the linen. I said it sounded a wearisome sort of attention to keep house under. She allowed that it might prove so, and poured out the last of the tea, and we passed on to the wedding, and to the spring.

"You will come to me at Hunsford," she said. It was not put as a question. "In March, when the roads are dry. I shall want somebody to laugh with by March."

"You are marrying the readiest supply of laughter in three counties."

"To laugh with, Eliza."

I promised her March.

Mr. Collins, in the days that remained of his visit, fluttered between Longbourn and Lucas Lodge in a state of anxious gratitude and excitement. The recollection of having been refused under our roof appeared to trouble him not at all, now that Lucas Lodge had supplied the deficiency, and he spoke of his Charlotte with the satisfaction of a man who has mislaid a glove and found a better one. I set his lightness down, as I had before, to a nature too smooth to take a lasting impression; and when he was gone at last into Kent, the house felt larger, and my mother began to speak of him almost fondly, as one speaks of an illness survived.

The wedding was fixed for the new year. In the meantime there was the winter to be got through, and Meryton was making its own arrangements for that: the militia were settled into their quarters, the shops had reordered their ribbon, and my aunt Philips — who considered a regiment the finest thing to happen to society since the invention of cards — was getting up a party.