The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 12. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

"Do not make yourself uneasy about your apparel, cousin Elizabeth," said Mr. Collins, for the third time since breakfast. "Lady Catherine is far from requiring that elegance of dress in us which becomes herself and her daughter. Put on whatever of your clothes is superior to the rest; there is no occasion for anything more. She will not think the worse of you for being simply dressed. She likes to have the distinction of rank preserved."

"Then I shall preserve it for her," I said, "to the best of my wardrobe's power," and went up to dress, leaving him to begin upon Mary, who at least took notes.

We were to dine at Rosings that evening — the summons had come on my third day, borne back from the great house by Mr. Collins in the manner of a man carrying something breakable — and the hours before it were given over entirely to preparation, none of it mine. Mr. Collins rehearsed us in the rooms we should see and the plate we should eat off and the questions her ladyship might condescend to put; Mary attended to the whole of it gravely, asked sensible questions, and then, when he had gone to dress, stood a moment at the foot of the stairs with her hands folded.

"I am to play, I expect," she said. "Her ladyship always asks it, Mr. Collins says."

"Then she will be very well answered."

"I practise two hours a day," said Mary. "There are few women in Kent who can say as much."

I went up and re-pinned her hair myself, and told her that nobody in that house would have worked harder for their dinner, and was rewarded with the rarest article my sister had: a smile she had not first considered the propriety of.

We crossed the park on foot, half a mile by the lane Mr. Collins preferred because it gave the longest unbroken view of the house. Rosings did not need the favour. It was a large, handsome place that had stopped trying to impress anyone several generations ago, money grown quiet with sitting still; the impressing had been taken over wholesale by its owner, and, in her absence, by Mr. Collins, who gave us the cost of the chimney-piece again as we came up the steps. I had the figure by heart from the assembly at Meryton, a lifetime ago. It had not got cheaper.

Lady Catherine de Bourgh received us in the smaller of her drawing-rooms, which would have held the whole ground floor of the parsonage, and I will own that my first sight of her was a kind of relief. Here at last was the woman I had been hearing of since the autumn, and she was neither dragon nor sibyl: a tall, large-featured lady past fifty, handsome once and stately still, sitting very upright in a chair drawn a little apart from the others, who looked at us as we were brought in and did not trouble to soften the looking. Whatever she saw, she meant to see all of it.

"Miss Bennet," she said, when the introductions had been performed. "You are the cousin. Sit there, where I can see you."

I sat there, where she could see me. She made full use of the arrangement.

I had been looked at before — a country assembly is a school of being looked at — but Lady Catherine looked as the great look at a horse they have half a mind to buy: up, down, point by point, at her own pace, with no apology offered because it had never entered her head that one could be owed. While we waited for dinner she put me through my catechism. My father's estate, and the terms of the entail; my sisters, their number and ages and whether any were married; whether we had kept a governess (we had not, which she could not for some minutes get past); whether I played, whether I drew, whether I had been presented; and, at the last, my age, which I declined to give with enough good humour that she repeated the question on the supposition I had not understood it.

"You cannot be more than twenty, I am sure, so you need not conceal it."

"With three younger sisters grown up," I said, "your ladyship can hardly expect me to own to it."

She stared at me then and announced that I gave my opinion very decidedly for so young a person. I could not tell whether I had pleased or offended; I am not sure the distinction operated within her; the look was the same for both, long, level, and proprietary, and I set it down as the way of a woman who had spent forty years being the most consequential object in every room she entered, and looked at the rest of creation accordingly, as inventory.

Miss de Bourgh sat a little out of the candlelight through the whole of this, and I am ashamed to say how long it took me to attend to her properly. I had taken her, at first glance, for a lady some ten years my senior at least: a sallow, folded-up figure in an expensive shawl, with the dry look about the eyes and mouth that long illness gives, as though the face had been worn by more years than had actually passed through it. She said nothing. She was the only person at Rosings who did not look at me at all in the way her mother did; her look came to me once across the room and went on through me, to the window or the dark or nothing, the unfocused gaze of someone attending to a thing the room did not contain. Illness, I thought. The poor creature is somewhere else because being here is too tiring. When dinner was announced she rose, and I had my one surprise of the evening so far: unfolded, she stood very nearly her mother's height — taller than I — and then the stoop took it back again before she had crossed the room, the way a tall plant goes over when it has been kept from the light.

Whatever else was thin at Rosings, the dinner was not. We ate off the promised plate, and Mr. Collins carved and praised and agreed himself nearly to death at the foot of the table, and Lady Catherine conducted the conversation in the sense that a coachman conducts a coach. Mary made two attempts upon subjects of her own — the first on the moral utility of great houses, which was taken from her at the turn and driven elsewhere, and the second on the contents of a sermon she had lately copied out, which Lady Catherine interrupted at the third sentence to observe that the fish was underdone, the Hunsford fishmonger being a man who required to be watched, as she had told Mr. Collins's housekeeper repeatedly. Mary sat back with her lips pressed to a line, and applied herself to the underdone fish in a silence with edges on it, and I, who had spent my life watching my sister talked over at a smaller table, found I had less appetite for the spectacle than the dinner deserved. She was ungracious about it. I could not blame her, and could not help her.

Miss de Bourgh ate almost nothing, and her mother accounted for her the while, as she might have done for the defects of her carriage. Anne's health did not permit the fish; Anne's health was much improved this spring; had Anne's constitution allowed of application, no performance in the kingdom would have touched hers, on the instrument or anywhere else. Anne, under this, neither agreed nor disagreed nor visibly heard, but went on looking through the epergne at some point behind it; and once — only once — her look crossed Mr. Collins where he sat, and stopped on the way through him, the way one's eye will catch on a snag in passing; and what was in her face I could not read then and shall not pretend to have read. Mr. Collins, for his part, was at his fourth helping of agreement. In that house his manner had come fully into its own — the anticipating, the adjusting, the little pause before each opinion to see which way her ladyship's was tending — and I understood at last that what I had been watching all these months in parlours and at card-tables had been a man practising, and that this table was the thing he had been practising for.

After dinner Lady Catherine would have music. Mary went to the pianoforte with the readiness of a woman who has practised two hours a day for exactly this summons, and played — correctly, thoroughly, and at a volume that left no doubt of the work in it. Lady Catherine listened for half a minute and then talked through the rest, as I am told the great do at the opera.

It was over the music, with Mary fortissimo and well away, that she arrived at the subject of my sister's marriage.

"Mrs. Collins does well enough," she said, in the voice of a woman granting a point against herself. "I am glad to see Mr. Collins settled; a clergyman ought to be married, I have always said so. But I am told the first young lady — the one who was lost was a sensible, useful, managing kind of person, and from everything I have heard of her I think it likely she would have been more at ease in the parsonage than the lady he has now. It was a great pity. Such a person is not easily replaced."

She said it exactly as she had said the fish was underdone. Beside me I felt Mr. Collins go still, the stillness of a man in a doorway in a high wind; and then he said that her ladyship was very good, and that poor Miss Lucas had indeed been everything that was sensible, and his voice came out at the right pitch with nothing in it at all. I looked at my plate of fruit until I could trust my own face with the candlelight. At the instrument my sister, who had not heard a word of it, brought her piece home through the last bars with both hands and turned on the stool for the verdict; and Lady Catherine told her she would never play really well unless she practised more, and offered her the use of the pianoforte in the housekeeper's room, where she would be in nobody's way.

The evening gave one more thing before it let us go. The card-table had been talked over rather than played at, and her ladyship, shuffling cards, informed us that we were fortunate in the season of our visit: her nephews were expected at Rosings before Easter: her sister's son the colonel, and Mr. Darcy of Pemberley, whom she did not doubt we had heard of, his name being known, she believed, even in Hertfordshire. Mr. Collins confirmed that the name was known even in Hertfordshire. I said nothing at all.

We walked home across the dark park behind the lantern, Mr. Collins narrating the evening to us as though we had not been present at it, Mary silent on my arm with her music under her elbow and her account of the night already half arranged into a lesson on the vanity of great persons, which I heard the whole of before we reached the white gate, and could not in conscience dispute. Of the two pieces of news I carried up to bed — that Lady Catherine meant to see a great deal more of me, and that Mr. Darcy was expected at Rosings by Easter — I could not have said which I liked less, and I lay awake a while deciding.