The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 20. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

"You will go by Bromley, of course."

It was not a question, and I had learned by then not to answer the ones that were not questions, so Lady Catherine continued without me. "Everybody goes by Bromley. If you mention my name at the Bell you will be attended to; mention it at the Crown and you will be overcharged, for the man there is an upstart and keeps his hay too long. You will take the carriage as far as the first stage and you will tell your mother, when you are home, that she is fortunate in her daughters beyond what I can suppose her to deserve, since she contrived to teach neither of you music nor drawing nor anything else that I have been able to discover."

"I shall give her every word of it, ma'am," I said, and meant it, for it would keep my father entertained through three dinners at least.

We were a week from our going by then, and the farewell calls had begun, Rosings requiring several, in the way that royal leave is taken by stages. Her ladyship had much to say on each occasion. On Mary's recovery, which had been managed creditably though she herself would have had the bandage changed oftener. On Mary's pianoforte practice, which must on no account lapse merely because she had been struck on the head, the head and the fingers being separate organs. The unwisdom of two young women crossing three counties with only a maid, which she pronounced with such relish for the dangers that I understood them to be, in her view, the principal attraction of travel. She was generous, after her fashion: the carriage, a basket of the succession-house fruit for Mary, her own receipt for a restorative jelly pressed on Mrs. Hollis with instructions to follow it exactly and none of the Hunsford apothecary's notions. I record it as it was: she did everything for us that week that money and command could do, and said over the top of it every word that self-consequence could supply, and I do not believe it once occurred to her that there was any other way of being kind.

It was during the second of these calls, with the mother enthroned by the fire and the daughter folded into her corner out of the candlelight, that I noticed something.

They were not alike, the two of them — I have set down already how the one looked at you, point by point, like a buyer, and the other through you, at whatever it was she kept behind the room — and yet that afternoon, with both pairs of eyes raised to me across the tea-things, I saw what was alike in them, and it was this: they both stared to the point of rudeness. Most women are taught from their cradles not to look to long or too hard at others, but the DeBourg women stared as long as they chose, mother and daughter. I had seen it before. Somewhere, on someone, I had seen exactly that quality of attention, held past the lawful term. It nagged at me like a tune mislaid, and my mind, which had kept only one lodger since the night of Mary's confession, went where it was bound to go and produced him: Mr. Darcy, standing at the edge of a dozen rooms that spring, watching me the way other men read law.

There is the family likeness, I concluded. I poured out the tea and thought about Lady Catherine's nephew, which I had been doing anyway.

Anne came out to the phaeton sweep when we made our last call, which she had never done. She stood wrapped to the chin in June, and gave Mary a careful farewell and a flat instruction about resting her eyes; and then, while Mary was handed in, she said to me, in the sideways voice she kept for the things she actually meant:

"I am sorry you are going. You looked at things while you were here. Most people who come to this house only look at my mother." And then, before I had decided what was safe to do with that: "You will write to your cousin Mr. Collins, I hope. I shall ask him to read your letters to me. You write the way you talk, I think; it will be like having somebody still here."

"Then I shall write the long ones," I said, and her face did the small crooked thing that served it for a smile, and she went back into the house with her shawl held close; and I pitied her the whole length of the avenue, a lonely creature in a great cold house with nobody to look at things with, and counted myself, for all my freight, the richer woman of the two.

Mr. Collins parted from us at the parsonage gate in a speech that had plainly been worked on, and broke down once in the middle of it — at the word sister, of all places — and recovered himself and finished the architecture; and then, as the chaise moved, he walked beside it as far as the corner with his hand on the window frame, telling Mary through it to mind the draughts, to take the jelly, to write the day she arrived, the day after at the latest; and Mary, who had lectured that man across every dinner of her marriage, put her hand over his on the frame for a moment before the corner took him. I looked out the other window and gave their leave-taking the privacy of the lane.

Then the corner was behind us, and the green tunnel had us, and we were for home.