The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 13. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

We had been told to expect the gentlemen at Rosings by Easter. Nobody had told us to expect them at the parsonage the morning after they came.

Mrs. Hollis announced them before the breakfast things were well cleared — Mr. Darcy; Colonel Fitzwilliam — and Mr. Collins, who had gone up to the great house at first light to pay his respects and missed them by one lane, arrived home at a trot to find the visit already under way in his own parlour, which cost him something I never learned the size of.

Colonel Fitzwilliam I liked inside of five minutes, which I believe was about his average. He was the younger son of an earl, thirty or thereabouts, plain-faced and easy, with the gift of entering a strange parlour as though resuming a conversation begun the week before; and he had three subjects going before the tea was poured — the state of the roads out of London, a play he had seen half of, and a mare he had nearly bought on the way down — none of which he finished, each being abandoned at the first oncoming junction for whatever crossed it. It was like being called upon by a friendly weathervane. Mary got her sentence finished twice in the half-hour, which was twice more than at any Rosings dinner, because the colonel, whatever his own sentences did, had a kind ear for other people's.

Mr. Darcy, beside this performance, said almost nothing. He had bowed; he had asked after the health of my family in a voice that gave no purchase; and he had then taken a chair a little out of the circle and attended to the room — to Mary, to Mr. Collins's relation of his morning, to me — in the way I had by then privately classified, along with the weather and the post, among the operations of nature. I will be honest, since this account is good for nothing otherwise: I had braced for his coming with a thoroughness that ought to have warned me about myself, and his silence that first morning was a kind of disappointment. One does not whet a sword for weeks to be met with a bow.

The dinners resumed, doubled in company. Lady Catherine talked; the colonel agreed with her so cheerfully and so inattentively that she never once caught him at it; and her ladyship's way of looking at one — long, level, at her own pace — had by the third evening stopped being a thing I noticed and become a thing I expected, the way a habit gets into the furniture of an acquaintance and is not afterward seen. Mr. Collins managed. Mary endured. Anne sat out of the candlelight and looked through us all at her own arrangements.

It was at the second of these dinners that I was set down at the pianoforte, the colonel turning the pages, and Mr. Darcy came and stationed himself where he could see my face — deliberately, in his unhurried way, as a man takes up his position in the field during the shooting season. I played on and gave him notice that I was not to be frightened.

"You mean to alarm me, Mr. Darcy, by coming in all this state to hear me. But I have a stubbornness that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate me."

"I shall not say you are mistaken," he said, "because you could not really believe me to entertain any design of alarming you; and I have had the pleasure of your acquaintance long enough to know that you find great enjoyment in occasionally professing opinions which in fact are not your own."

I laughed — I could not help it; it was so exactly the kind of thing I said about him — and told the colonel his cousin was teaching me my own tricks. "You shall hear how ill I behaved in Hertfordshire, Colonel Fitzwilliam, and you had better hear it from me before he gives you his edition. The first time I ever saw Mr. Darcy was at a ball, where he danced not one dance, though gentlemen were scarce and more than one young lady was sitting down in want of a partner."

"I had not at that time the honour of knowing any lady in the assembly beyond my own party," said Mr. Darcy.

"True; and nobody can ever be introduced in a ball-room. Well, Colonel, what shall I play next? My fingers wait your orders."

Lady Catherine called across the room to know what we were saying, which spared me the work of an answer. I record the exchange because it was the evening I gave up pretending to myself that talking to Mr. Darcy was a duty. It was a pleasure of the quarrelsome kind, the kind one looks forward to as one looks forward to a fencing lesson, and I resented the looking forward a good deal more than I ever resented the man; he was only insufferable, while the looking forward was mine.

Then there were the calls.

He came to the parsonage perhaps half a dozen times in those weeks, sometimes with the colonel, twice alone, at hours when a man of sense might have presumed the ladies engaged. When the colonel came, the visit ran on his three-subjects-at-once method and was over before it could be felt. When Mr. Darcy came alone it was another matter entirely. He sat. He said little, and what he said had a direction I could feel and not see, like a current under smooth water.

"Your mother," he said, on the second of these occasions, when Mary had been called out to the kitchen and the clock had had the room to itself for some minutes. "She was much in Mr. Collins's company, I think, during his stay at Longbourn."

"As much as any hostess with five daughters and one heir under her roof. You have met my mother, sir; you may imagine the arithmetic for yourself."

"And she and Miss Lucas — they were on good terms?"

"My mother is on excellent terms with anyone who takes a daughter off her hands or might be brought to. Charlotte did neither, and then did worse, and my mother bore it with all the grace you would expect." I heard my own voice sharpening to an edge. "You are very full of questions about my family, Mr. Darcy, for a man who settled his opinion of them at an assembly ball some months ago, at twenty paces."

He did not answer that. He looked at the fire a moment, and then asked whether my mother had found the preparations for my younger sister's marriage very strenuous; and I said, with the last of my patience, Hill had dealt with most of it. Shortly after that, he went away.

I did not know what to make of this visit at first, but I soon decided that a proud man, having once read off a family's failings at a glance, was now at leisure in the country and amusing himself by confirming the verdict in detail. It fitted everything. It fitted the assembly, and the questions, and the eye he had kept on my mother in our drawing-room while Charlotte was three days dead. I was rather pleased with it as a piece of deducation. It did not occur to me that a man confirming a low opinion does not usually call twice, alone, in walking weather.

Of Anne de Bourgh in those weeks I had three glimpses out of her mother's hearing, and I set them down here in order, with the readings I gave them at the time, which were wrong.

The first was at the parsonage gate, where her phaeton stopped one fine morning while I was cutting the few roses out of the border, the garden at Rosings end of April being a pleasanter place than anyone in it. She watched me work a while, through me and past me in her usual fashion, and then said, in her flat, unexercised voice: "I think Miss Lucas would have had that border different. She knew about gardens. Sensible knowledge, nothing showy." And then, before I had done staring: "Mr. Collins spoke of her in his letters to my mother. One hears a great deal, sitting where I sit." The ponies took her on. I stood with the knife in my hand and thought: she has heard her mother's account of Charlotte and improved on it out of loneliness; the poor thing furnishes her empty days with other people's lives. It was the kindest reading and I was glad of it.

The second was at Rosings, in the minute the drawing-room took to assemble. Anne, beside me at the window: "My mother chose the curtains in your bedroom. She likes the parsonage kept a certain way. Mrs. Hollis understands her." It was oddly itemized knowledge for a young woman who never walked so far as the lane; and I answered something easy about great ladies and small houses, and set it down among the customs of Rosings, a country I was only visiting.

The third was the shortest. The colonel had been describing his regiment's spring reviews — he was of the ——shire Guards, a corps of great splendour and perfect safety, whose campaigns, he cheerfully owned, had been fought entirely in Hyde Park, and whose one heroic engagement in his time had carried off a supply wagon and the major's hat — and the room was laughing, and under the laughter Anne said, to me or to the window: "He is fortunate. It is a great thing, to be harmless." And then: "People talk in front of me as though I were a clock. I have been a clock a long time. It is wonderful what a clock hears." I looked at her then, properly, and she was looking through the window at the dark lawn, and her face had gone wherever it went; and I felt, for the first time and only for a moment, the thing I can best describe as a draught from under a door — the sense of a colder room adjoining, somewhere out of sight. I put it down to pity. She was three-and-twenty, I had learned, and sat slumped in candlelight like a woman of forty waiting out a sentence; there was draught enough in that to account for anything. So I pitied her, and was fond of the colonel, and quarrelled pleasantly with Mr. Darcy, and watched my month in Kent run out toward Easter with nothing settled in me at all.

The cousins' visit had a term, and it was approaching. The colonel let fall at dinner that they should be gone within the week — he said it lightly, between two other subjects, with a glance at me I did not examine — and I discovered I had an inventory of questions about Mr. Darcy that I had been keeping without admitting to the keeping, and that only a man who liked talking could answer them. In Colonel Fitzwilliam I knew exactly where to find one. The park, I thought, tomorrow, on his morning round; and I went up to bed arranging my questions in their most accidental order.