The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 15. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

Of my three hours I was given twenty minutes.

The bell went, and then the parlour door, and the maid had said his name before I had finished sweeping Jane's letters under my work-basket — which I did without thinking, the way one shields a wound from a man walking in with a stick, and was angrier for having done it, since the man whose eyes I was keeping my sister from was the man who had put her in the letters to begin with.

Mr. Darcy came in alone. I gave him a cold civility and an inquiry after the party at Rosings, which he did not answer. He asked after my headache. I said it mended. He sat down for the space of perhaps half a minute, got up again, and took a turn across the room to the mantel and back, and another, while the little parlour clock dealt out the silence; and I watched him with the beginnings of astonishment, for I had seen Mr. Darcy silent in a dozen rooms but never once unstill. Then he stopped in front of me, and said, in the voice of a man who has run out of alternatives:

"In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you."

My first sensation, I am ashamed to record, was pure blank disbelief — the sensation of a woman who has been winning an argument since October and is suddenly informed it was a courtship. He took my silence for encouragement; he could hardly, that evening, have done otherwise; and he went on.

He went on, and the astonishing thing — the thing I did not understand for a year and have never quite got over since — was the manner of it. He did not flatter. He did not plead.

"I am not a man who thought of marrying," he said. "I had never proposed it to myself. It formed no part of any plan I had made; I supposed, when I considered the matter at all, that some suitable arrangement would offer itself in its proper season, and I considered it very little. I tell you this so that you will understand the rest." He took another turn to the mantel and faced me from there. "From within a month of our acquaintance I have been engaged in an argument with myself, and I have lost it. Every consideration in the case is on my side of the question. The inferiority of your connections. Your mother's family — an attorney in Meryton, a man of trade in Cheapside. The certainty that my own family would account the match a degradation. I have set all of this against what I feel, more times than I can give you a number for; and a man may try a proof against a result only so often. The result does not yield. It has not altered by a grain. I have admired you against my judgment, against my interest, against my habit, and against my plain understanding of what I am; and the feeling stands, and the arguments lie where they fell, and I am done with them. I love you. Nothing I can bring against it answers. I ask you to be my wife."

He regarded the whole of it, plainly, as a finding of great strangeness. He had delivered it almost with bewilderment, and without the smallest suspicion that his accuracy was no compliment. And what he had asked of me, standing beside the workbasket hiding my sister's letters, was to relieve his struggle and be his wife.

He had no doubt of his answer. It was everywhere about him — in the ease that came over him as he finished, in the way he sat down at last, having discharged the difficult part. A man does not speak of degradation to a woman's face unless he is certain the woman is already won; and the certainty was the one part of the whole performance I understood at a glance, and it lit the rest.

"In such cases as this," I said, "it is, I believe, the established mode to express a sense of obligation for the sentiments avowed, however unequally they may be returned. If I could feel gratitude, I would now thank you. But I cannot. I have never desired your good opinion, and you have certainly bestowed it most unwillingly."

He had gone quite still again, mid-room, the agitation of a quarter-hour ago changed for the stillness I knew better.

"And this is all the reply I am to expect. I might, perhaps, wish to be informed why, with so little endeavour at civility, I am thus rejected."

"I might as well inquire why, with so evident a design of offending and insulting me, you chose to tell me that you liked me against your will, against your reason, and even against your character. But I have other provocations. You know I have. Do you think any consideration would tempt me to accept the man who has been the means of ruining, perhaps for ever, the happiness of a most beloved sister?"

He changed colour, but he did not look away, and he did not pretend to misunderstand me.

"Do you deny it?" I said. "Do you deny that you separated Mr. Bingley from Jane? That you parted two people who wanted nothing but each other, and congratulated yourself upon the parting?"

"I have no wish of denying that I did everything in my power to separate my friend from your sister," he said, "or that I rejoice in my success. Towards him I have been kinder than towards myself."

I waited. He walked to the mantel, set his hand on it, and gave me his reasons — gave them, even then, even there, in the same orderly way he had given me his love.

"My objections were not solely the want of connection, though that was grave. The behaviour of your family was such as must strike any observer who passed an evening in its company. But there were besides circumstances. Things had lately occurred in that neighbourhood, which made it impossible for me, in conscience, to leave my friend situated as he was. I say no more than that, and I am not at liberty to say more. His position required distance, and I procured him the distance, and were it all to do again tomorrow I would do it."

"You need not strain for delicacy, sir; I can supply the plainness you are not at liberty to. My mother is loud, my sisters are wild, my uncle is an attorney in Meryton, and a woman was murdered within a mile of our gate; and a man of Mr. Bingley's consequence could not be suffered to bind himself to a family so — circumstanced. Is the construction unjust?"

He was silent a moment too long. "You have a right to read it so," he said, which I took then for the assent of a man too proud to soften his own snobbery, and have had a long time since to hear differently.

"And Mr. Wickham?" I said. "What of him? What have you to say on that head? Or does liberty fail you there too?"

"You take an eager interest in that gentleman's concerns."

"Who that knows what his misfortunes have been can help feeling an interest in him?"

"His misfortunes!" The word came out of him like a thing dropped on stone. "Yes. His misfortunes have been great indeed."

"And of your infliction. You have reduced him to his present state of poverty — you have withheld what you know was meant for him — and you speak of his misfortunes with contempt."

"You do not know of what you speak." He had come away from the mantel; his voice had gone very level, which I had learned by then was the opposite of calm. "On that subject I will say nothing further. You have my assurance that you are mistaken, and I am aware of how little my assurance is presently worth in this room."

"Oh, yes, every account is settled in your own favour by your own word, in the court of your own conscience. From the first moment of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressed me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry."

"And had I behaved otherwise this evening?" he said. "Had I flattered you — concealed the struggle, professed an unmixed inclination? You might have overlooked the rest, had your pride not been hurt by my honest confession of the scruples—"

"You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner."

That struck home. In all the months I had been fencing with him I had never once touched him, and I knew it now by the difference; he went white along the cheekbones, and for a moment the room held a man with no answer in him at all.

"You have said quite enough, madam," he said at last. "I perfectly comprehend your feelings, and have now only to be ashamed of what my own have been. Forgive me for having taken up so much of your time, and accept my best wishes for your health and happiness."

He bowed, and was gone. I heard the front door, and then the gate, and then nothing but the parlour clock, restored to its possession of the room.

I sat down. The anger blocked my tears for another quarter of an hour, and the tears were done before the candle needed trimming, for they could not settle on its object: Jane, or Wickham's wrongs, or the plain insolence of the man. Mr. Darcy of Pemberley had loved me against the whole grain of his judgment, and that of all the women in England he had laid that struggling, insulting, honest account of himself in front of me. Somewhere under my fury, lurked the knowledge that no man would ever pay me a compliment of that size again in my life.

When the others came in from Rosings at ten I was in my room with the candle out, listening through the floorboards while Mr. Collins related the evening's condescensions to the hall at large. I did not sleep much, and I did not cry again; anger is the better candle, and I had a great deal to see by. But somewhere toward morning it occurred to me that a man who gave his evidence in such good order would not leave Kent with the case standing as he had left it.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 14. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

The trouble with laying snares in a park is that one cannot choose one's game.

I went out early, by the grove where the colonel made his morning round, with my questions about Mr. Darcy folded up small and a face arranged for happy accident; and the gentleman who came round the turn of the path, hat in hand, walking as though the grove were a thing to be got through rather than enjoyed, was Mr. Darcy himself. We were both of us visibly the wrong person. He recovered first — he asked whether I walked there often, said three further things at intervals of forty yards, none of which survived in my memory past the saying, and at the parsonage gate bowed and went on; and I stood looking after him and concluded that he had come out to be disagreeable in the open air for variety, the rooms at Rosings being all used up. My snare I carried home unsprung. The colonel, I learned afterward, had ridden out with the steward all morning, being the kind of man who will agree to anything at breakfast.

The summons to Rosings overtook us at noon, and so it was an evening with the whole company, and my questions had to keep another day. I will give the evening honestly, because I enjoyed it, and because I have set myself the rule of this account that I am not to be wiser on the page than I was in the room.

Mary played. She had brought new music and a fortnight's practice to bear, and when Lady Catherine's attention had gone elsewhere I went and turned my sister's pages myself — I had not forgotten the fish dinner — and was paid with the second of her unconsidered smiles, which were becoming, by Kentish reckoning, almost frequent. It was while I stood at the instrument that Mr. Darcy came and took up his old position where he could see my face; and I had learned by then what to do with the arrangement, which was to use it.

"You are come to examine me again, Mr. Darcy. I am grown quite used to it. You stood just so at my aunt Philips's, the whole of an evening — an hour of sentry duty by the wall, and at the end of it you asked the one woman in the room most certain to quarrel with you to dance."

"I chose the conversation likeliest to repay the standing."

"Then you were well served, for you got nothing from it but impertinence."

"I got the only half-hour of that evening I can still give an account of," he said, and before I had decided what to do with that, Lady Catherine's voice arrived from her chair by the fire.

"What is that you are saying, Darcy? What is it you are talking of? Let me hear what it is."

"We are speaking of music, madam," said he, with a composure that I privately awarded full marks, considering.

"Of music! Then pray speak aloud. There are few people in England, I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient." She then instructed Mary, through two full movements, in the management of her wrists; and the room having thus been re-tuned to its proper key, Mr. Darcy and I were left to ourselves at the margin of it.

"You mean to frighten me out of finding your character, sir, but you will not manage it. I am making a study of it, and the materials are contradictory. Your cousin tells me of a man who is the soul of liberality among his own people, and I have seen a man who would not be introduced to strangers at any price the country could offer. Which is the forgery?"

"Neither. I have not the talent some possess," he said, "of appearing to advantage among people I have never seen. I cannot catch their tone, or seem interested in their concerns, as I observe other men do."

"I do not play this instrument as well as my sister," I said, nodding at Mary, "and I have always supposed it my own fault, for not practising. A man may say the same of catching strangers' tones."

"You are perfectly right. The fault is laziness, or worse. We neither of us perform to strangers, Miss Bennet — you have said so yourself — but you have the kinder audience of the two, for yours forgives the performance and mine only endures it."

"Now you are fishing for contradiction, and I shall not give it. Let us have your defects instead; you will be safer there. Come, you have examined the whole county; submit to a little examination in your turn."

"I have faults enough," he said, "but I hope they are none of them faults of understanding. My temper I cannot vouch for. It might be called resentful. My good opinion, once lost, is lost for ever."

"That is a failing indeed. Implacable resentment is a shade in a character. But you have chosen your fault well — I cannot laugh at it. You are safe from me."

"There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome."

"And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody."

"And yours," he said, with a smile, "is wilfully to misunderstand them."

I had my mouth open for the return — I had three returns, and was choosing among them like a woman at a ribbon counter — when Lady Catherine demanded to know what we were saying for the second time, and music was applied to all of us until the carriage. I record that I went home down the dark lane in a glow of good temper I attributed entirely to the quality of the fencing, and gave not one thought to my opponent's reasons for offering me his breast to hit at of an evening. I was winning an argument. I had been winning it, by my own count, since October. Colonel Fitzwilliam, who had spent the evening on the sofa with the face of a man given excellent seats at a play, said as we parted that he had rarely seen his cousin so well entertained, and I took it for a compliment to my wit, and so it was, and that is all I took it for.

The next morning my snare caught its intended game at last. The colonel came swinging along the grove path on his last day but two, hailed me from twenty yards, and fell in beside me as though we had arranged it — which one of us had.

He was easy, as always, and three subjects deep before the first turning: the regiments going to Brighton, a cousin's wedding he was bid to in May, the melancholy economics of younger sons. He was very droll about the last. He must marry money, he said, younger sons of earls being a luxury article kept up entirely for show, like the Guards themselves — "we are the two finest regiments in England, Miss Bennet, my brother officers and I and the unmarried younger sons, and neither of us has ever been fired upon" — and I laughed and led him, by the most accidental of my accidental questions, to the subject of his cousin.

"Oh, Darcy is the best friend going," said the colonel, "if you can stand the management. He looks after his people, you know — looks after them whether they will or no. It is his only vice. He takes care of his sister, his estate, his friends' affairs, my travelling arrangements, and the seating at his aunt's table, all in the same spirit, and the rest of us are left nothing to do but be grateful. Why, on this very journey he gave me a proof of it I am not supposed to repeat — though there are no names in it, so I shall. He was congratulating himself, in his quiet way, on having lately saved a friend from a most imprudent marriage. Steered him clean out of it, just in time, and counts it among the best offices he ever did a man. There is Darcy entire: the friend sleeps safe in his bed and never knows how near he came to happiness."

He laughed at his own turn, and I laughed with him, at the proper volume, in the proper place.

"Did Mr. Darcy give his reasons for the rescue?" I asked. "One likes the whole of a story."

"There were no strong objections to the lady herself, I understood. The family, I believe — something amiss with the family. He did not enlarge upon it and I did not press; it was a confidence, you know, even without the names." He swung his stick at a dandelion clock and moved to his fourth subject, the fishing at Pemberley, and I walked beside him down the whole length of the grove agreeing that trout were difficult, while behind my face the names he had left out of his story arranged themselves in their only possible order.

Jane. The family — something amiss with the family. My mother's volume, my sisters' wildness, the whole catalogue read off at twenty paces a year ago and never re-examined; and on the strength of it, two people who had loved each other parted by a third, who had then congratulated himself on his success. There had been a week, after Netherfield emptied, when Jane asked me whether she had been mistaken in him, whether she had shown too little, whether it were her own fault; and she had carried it ever since with that steadiness that was worse than weeping; and the man responsible had been standing in his aunt's drawing-room these three weeks, offering me his defects to laugh at, telling me his good opinion once lost was lost for ever — as though his good opinion had been the thing on trial.

The colonel handed me through the parsonage gate with some pleasantry I answered. I have no memory of it. He went off down the lane perfectly content with his morning, a kind man who never in his life learned what he had done in the course of it; and that ignorance, I came in time to understand, was the only innocent thing in the whole business, and I have never once held it against him.

The others were engaged to Rosings that evening. I pleaded my headache — which by six o'clock was honest — and was left alone in the parlour with the candles and my sister's letters, which I read straight through twice, every page of her careful unhappiness fresh under my hand. The house was quiet. Rosings would keep them all till ten. I had three hours, I reckoned, to be angry in private, and I meant to use every one of them.

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.

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.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 11. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

I had come a hundred miles into Kent to see my sister, and I spent the last five of them practising the truth of it.

The road into Hunsford in the last week of March was a green tunnel made of hedges, and I had it nearly to myself, a hired maid asleep in the corner of the chaise and a great deal of time to think about the thing I had come all this way in order not to think about.

I had better give the winter its due here and have done, for it does not want a chapter and shall not have one. Charlotte was buried, and mourned, and by the turn of the year had passed into the settled history of the neighbourhood as a sad business on a bad road — footpads, never taken, never likely to be — the kind of thing that befalls other people until the morning it befalls you. What would not pass so quietly into history was Mr. Collins. The verdict that had begun to gather about him before Charlotte was a week in the ground had wanted only a little more time to set into the sort of thing nobody says and everybody holds; and then Mr. Collins had upset the whole of it by marrying my sister Mary inside three months, which the neighbourhood received as either the last proof of his hard heart or the last proof of his innocence, according to the cast of the speaker's mind, and went on declaring both over the same teapot.

Jane, through all of it, said very little. Mr. Bingley did not come again to Netherfield; the house stayed shut and the knocker off the door; and Jane did not grow worse, which in Jane was a different thing entirely from growing better, and she carried the loss of him with a steadiness that alarmed me more than any amount of weeping could have done.

As for myself, I had told the world, and told myself oftener and more firmly than I told anyone, that I was going into Kent to see my married sister settled in her own home. It was true. It was simply not the whole of why I had come, and the remainder was a thing I had no name for and did not go looking to name: only that Charlotte's death had never, in all the months since, lain quiet in me; that I went about with a low, wordless unease I had agreed to call grief, because grief was a thing one was permitted; and that when the summons to Hunsford came I had taken it up rather faster than a visit to Mary, by itself, could account for. I did not ask myself why. I had grown practised, that winter, at not asking myself things.

The chaise turned in at a white gate, and there was the parsonage — a tidy, square, comfortable house with a green door and a garden already being made to behave — and there on the step, before the wheels had stopped, stood Mr. Collins.

"Cousin Elizabeth!" He was down the path and handing me out before the maid was well awake. "My dear cousin Elizabeth. You are most heartily welcome to Hunsford — most heartily. Mrs. Collins has been counting the days; I may say we have both been counting them; the spare room has stood aired this fortnight against your coming. You are very welcome, cousin. Very welcome indeed."

It was the greeting of a man honestly relieved to have his own people under his roof, and I scarcely knew where to put it, having braced myself for civility and been met with welcome three times over. If there ran through the relief a thread that did not quite answer to the words — one does not, as a rule, thank a guest so very many times merely for arriving — I was stiff from the road and let it lie. He was the same man I had refused at Longbourn, every gesture of him unchanged. Only the ground beneath the gestures had shifted, and I could not yet have told you into what.

Mary received me in the parlour, and rose, and kissed me, and held me off at arm's length to take stock.

"You are pale, Lizzy," she said. "I have always held that we were not meant to be flung the length of the country in hired chaises; a woman keeps her health best where her duties keep her. But you are come, and I am glad of it." The last of it she said quite simply, and meant, and I was reminded that whatever Mary did to a sentiment in the course of arranging it, the thing underneath was as often as not a sound one.

"I am glad to be come, and I shall be paler yet if you keep me on my feet in my travelling-dress. Let me sit down before you set about improving me."

"I do not improve people," said Mary, who did little else but try. "I say what is true and leave them the use of it." But she rang for the tea, and put me in the best chair, and asked after our mother and after Jane with a real anxiousness that her way of asking very nearly hid; and for the few minutes before Mr. Collins came in to us, we were two sisters who had not met since the winter and were gladder of one another than either of us was built to say.

The house was beautifully kept, and not by Mary. I had been raised under a mother who could govern neither a still-room nor her own nerves, and I knew the marks of a house run from the floor up rather than the top down. The housekeeper was a Mrs. Hollis, square and capable, who had kept the living's house through two incumbents before Mr. Collins and plainly meant to keep it through however many came after, new mistress or none. Mary had not disputed the ground with her. The household as a kingdom held no charm for my sister; Mrs. Hollis's competence had made that want of interest cost nothing at all.

What Mary had taken up instead, in the space the housekeeping left empty in her, was Mr. Collins. She had found in her husband a standing occasion for improvement, and gave herself to it with the thoroughness of a woman who has waited a great while for a subject that would hold still to be instructed. At dinner I saw the whole of it. Mr. Collins had hardly done with grace before he was telling me of a sermon he had lately preached upon the duties of contentment, which had been, he was glad to say, very well received.

"It would have been the better received, Mr. Collins," said Mary, "had you not preached contentment in the very week you dined three times at the great house. The poor will take a deal of doctrine from a man; they will not take it from his full plate. I have said as much to you before."

"You have, my dear," said Mr. Collins. "You have said as much." And he turned to me as though not a word had passed, and pressed me to a little more of the sauce.

It was kindly meant, every word of it. Mary had never in her life spoken a sentiment she did not hold to be improving, and she believed the whole of this one, and was, as it fell out, entirely right about the sermon. But Mr. Collins bore it with a tight, unbroken courtesy that did not slip once; and a man may be grateful to have a wife, I saw, and be no nearer content with her. I had the whole of their marriage inside four minutes — an imperfect thing that went on nonetheless, as most do, by everybody agreeing not to lean too hard upon it. It was no worse than many. In the state I was in that spring it was the kindest reckoning I had to give, and I gave it, and let the matter alone. I loved my sister. I said nothing.

Before the light went, Mr. Collins would not be denied the showing of his garden, which was his pride, and the prospect at the end of it, which was his greater pride and none of his own. He brought me to a gap in the trees at the foot of the lawn and bade me look. There, across a shallow valley and up its own rising ground, stood Rosings: a large, handsome, modern house with a great many windows.

"Sixty-four, cousin," said Mr. Collins. "I have counted them in every light. Every one of them glazed at very considerable expense by the late Sir Lewis de Bourgh. I have it on her ladyship's own authority that the cost came to a sum I should hesitate to name were the source less unimpeachable." He named it anyway, and the rooms that lay behind a number of the windows besides.

The house stood in the last of the spring light, and I looked at it some while longer than the view repaid, and thought about the woman inside it, of whom I had been hearing for half a year and whom I had never seen.

Her name was much in Mr. Collins's mouth that evening, as I had thought it would be. We were to dine at Rosings; the honour was already shaping itself; her ladyship had been told of my coming and had been graciously pleased to express a wish to see me, which Mr. Collins delivered as a man relays a summons from a throne. And when he spoke her name — and this I did mark, for I had marked it before, at Longbourn and over my aunt Philips's card-table — something entered into him that I had always set down to the awe of a small man before a great patroness. He sat the straighter for it. His voice took on the care of a man stepping where he has been assured the floor is sound and does not altogether believe the assurance.

They put me to bed early, and I was glad to go. The unfamiliar house settled and ticked around me as such houses do, and somewhere out past the dark trees Rosings stood with its many windows, and I told myself again, as I had told everyone, that I had come into Kent to see my sister; and so I had; and I went to sleep upon the half of the truth that would consent to let me.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 10. Narrated by Bingley, from his diary.

Netherfield Park, the 26th of November, near midnight

We are for London in the morning. I did not decide it. Darcy decided it somewhere between the soup and the withdrawal of the cloth, and by the time I had understood that it was decided I found I had agreed to it, and that the horses were ordered for eight, and that Caroline was already glad. I have gone where Darcy pointed ever since I was nineteen, and he hauled me out of a scrape at Cambridge that I have never told the whole of to anyone. He was already then in his mid-twenties, visiting some cousin who was up at Cambridge at the same time, and under no obligation to take notice of a youngster six or seven years his junior. I've never been sorry to follow his advice, and I am not sorry now. I am only very low, and the house is all boxes, and I have been twice to the window that gives on the Longbourn road for no errand I could have named to a magistrate.

Charlotte Lucas is a week in the ground. She was a good, quiet, sensible sort of woman, and was to have been mistress of a parsonage by Christmas, and instead the parson is at Longbourn being grieved over and she is under the sod past the spinney, and I find I mind it a great deal more than I have any right to, having known her chiefly to bow to. Juno frets in a strange house and I am taking her up to town with me, which is no place for a young dog and I know it, and I could no more leave her behind than fly. So there is my whole establishment: a low heart and a restless bitch and a friend who has decided we are going.

Darcy came up to me after the ladies had gone through. He had his travelling face on already.

"You are ready to leave," he said. It was not quite a question.

"I am coming. I only wish I knew what we run from. The year is not so far gone that a week could not be spared."

"There is nothing to keep us. My business in town will not wait on the weather, and yours—" he let that stand a moment "—yours is better done anywhere but at the bottom of a Hertfordshire lane, mooning after a lady who, on the evidence, will bear your absence a good deal more evenly than you are bearing the prospect of hers."

I had no answer to that I cared to give him, because he had said it to me once already, up at the shooting, and I had not been able to knock it down then either. It is a hard thing to be told twice, in a fortnight, that the woman you have been counting on has not been counting on you. I do not believe it. I have decided that I do not believe it. But a thing a man has decided not to believe sits heavier in him than a thing he has never been asked to, and it made the packing easier than it had any business being, and I hate that it did.

I turned him off Jane the only way I know, which is to talk of something worse. I said it was a grim country to be leaving in any case, with the roads what they were and a woman knocked on the head in daylight not two miles from where we sat.

That reached him where nothing else at the table had. He has been strange about Charlotte Lucas since the day we made our call.

"They will lay it to footpads and take no man for it," I said, "though there's talk in Meryton it lay nearer home. The parson, betrothed and bereaved inside a season and headlong to the next Miss Bennet before the first was cold — you have only to say it in the right parlour and watch the heads go."

"It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has facts, Bingley. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, in place of theories to suit facts. Your parson may be the guiltiest man in the county or the most ill-used in it. You have not the grounds to say which, and no more have they."

I said I supposed not, and felt the county's certainty go thin in my hands, as certainties do once Darcy has held them a moment.

"Here is a fact, in place of the local gossip," he said. "She was not robbed."

"She was set upon on the open road—"

"But nothing was taken from her. Her purse was on her when they carried her home; her people had it back with the rest of her things, untouched." He had gone to the window. "A man who kills for a purse takes the purse. That is the curious circumstance, and the whole neighbourhood has walked round it, because footpads are a comfortable thing to be murdered by. They ask nothing of the living but a lock on the door."

I asked how in the world he came to know what was in a dead woman's pockets, and he said he had inquired, as though a gentleman making it his business to find out how a neighbour came to be killed were the most ordinary matter in England.

"I do not like how she died," he said. "I do not mean to let it go into the ground with her. Someone did that on a public road in the afternoon sun and walked home to his dinner, and I will not have it left at footpads because footpads are easier for everyone to bear. But by the same token, the neighbourhood where she died is not perhaps a very wholesome one for outsiders such as yourself."

I said I hoped he might get to the bottom of it, and meant it, and had not the smallest idea what I was wishing him toward. It is like Darcy to take a stranger's death for his own quarrel; he cannot pass a wrong lying in the road any more than he could pass a gate left open. I have envied him a great many things and never once envied him that, for it looks to me like a heavy way to go through the world. But it is the truest thing in him, and I would not have it out if I could.

So we go. I have his word for it that London is the thing, and my own low spirits agreeing with him for reasons of their own, and between the two of them I am carried. Convincing had little to do with it. I would follow him tonight if he told me the moon wanted seeing to.

I have meant, this hour and more, to write a line to Miss Bennet before we go — only that we are called away, that it is nothing of her doing, that I am her servant. The pen is here by me. But I do not know how a man writes even so much to a lady he has been assured, twice now and on good authority, thinks of him with no more than a mild goodwill; and I find I would rather carry it to town unwritten and think on it there than set down the wrong thing tonight and have it go before me on the eight o'clock road. It will keep till London. Most things, it seems, will keep till London.

The horses are at eight. Juno is under the desk with her chin on my foot and will not be moved.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 9. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

Charlotte was to come to us at two, and a little before the hour I carried my work to the window that looked down the Meryton road, to catch her turning in at the gate. She did not come at two. By half past I had supposed her kept by her mother, or her wedding-clothes, and had gone back to my needle. It was near three when a horse came up the lane too fast for a visitor, and I knew before the rider was down from the saddle that he had not come to pay a call.

He asked for my father. They were a while in the hall, and that discussion was wrong too. I heard my father's voice once, low, and then nothing, and then Hill sent running for my mother. When my father came in to us he came holding the door frame, which I had never once seen him do, and he looked first at me, of everyone in the room.

"Lizzy," he said. "It is Charlotte Lucas."

The man had come from my uncle Philips, who had it from the surgeon, who had been sent for far too late. Charlotte had set out from Lucas Lodge after her early dinner to walk the stretch of road that lay between her father's house and ours, and somewhere on the open ground past the spinney she had been set upon. Footpads, they said. A woman alone on a road in the broad afternoon, and no one within call, and by the time she was found there was nothing to be done but carry her home. The officers turned out to scour the country after the men who had done it, and came back with nothing to show.

I do not remember rising from my chair. I remember my mother's voice running on somewhere about the wickedness of the roads and the want of a proper watch, and Jane's hand closing hard over mine, and the plain effort it costs to keep one's face in order when one has been taught from the cradle that a lady does not make a spectacle of her own feelings in a room full of people. I kept it in order. I have kept it in order on worse days since, and it was that afternoon I learned how.

They had the whole of it settled very fast — the road, the hour, the men who must have done it and got clean away to wherever such men go. It was a reasonable account. Roads were not safe; women were not safe upon them; the thing happened, and went on happening, and one read of it in the papers. And it would not lie down in me. I could not have told you what was wrong with it. I told myself nothing was; that grief was making me quarrel with a plain fact because the plain fact was unbearable and a puzzle would at least be something to hold; that I wanted there to be a reason because a reason could be hated, and footpads could only be feared. I was very likely right about that. I let it alone, because there was nothing else to be done with it, and because Charlotte was dead whatever the truth of the road, and that was the only fact that asked anything of me.

Meryton knew how to do the rest. The calls began, and the covered dishes, and the voices lowered in the passage that rise again the moment the bereaved are out of hearing. Lady Lucas could not be seen at all; Sir William could be seen, and could not speak, which in him was the worse thing to witness. And beneath the proper sorrow ran the other current, the curiosity about what would become of Charlotte's betrothed. A young woman newly promised, dead before her wedding. Mr. Collins not a month acquainted with her, and so headlong to the altar, and now so stricken that he could not be left alone. Nobody said it. Everybody left the room for it to stand in. I heard the shape of the question well before anyone had the indecency to put it into words, and I will not pretend that I had not, in some low corner of myself, already asked it about Mr. Collins.

He was still under our roof. He had never left it since the visit of olive-branch and family duty that had begun the whole business, and there could be no question now of sending him off to grieve among strangers. My father bore the prolonging of his stay with a patience I had not known he kept by him. Collins was wretched. Whatever I had thought of him before — and I had thought most things — I could not sit in a room with him that week and call his grief a performance. He said Charlotte's name a great many times over, in the voice of a man who has not yet taken in that saying it will fetch no answer. I watched him do it. I did not know what I was watching. Distress I could see plainly; what lay under the distress I could not see at all, and I was honest enough with myself, even then, not to mistake the one for proof against the other.

Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy came to pay their respects on the third day. Bingley did it as he did everything, with a warmth that asked nothing in return and made the room easier for the while he was in it; he went to Jane and sat by her and was simply kind, and she was glad of him in the still way she was glad of every good thing. Mr. Darcy did it as a man discharges an obligation. He said the right words to Mr. Collins, few of them and none ill-chosen, and then he stood a little apart and looked at us — at my mother, at Collins, at Mary — with the closed, attending stillness I had seen him wear at the assembly when he was reckoning the worth of a room and finding it small; and I was angry, through everything else I was that day, that he could walk into a house of mourning and do nothing in it but take its measure.

My mother was the worst of us, and never knew it. She had not forgiven Charlotte the engagement while Charlotte lived, and now that there was no Charlotte left to forgive she could not quite find the feeling the hour demanded. She began well enough.

"Such a steady, sensible girl," she said, "and to be taken off so — I am sure I have not had a proper night's sleep since the news came. It does not bear thinking of, a thing of that kind, and so near our own door." But she could never hold to a course for long. "Still, we must be thankful for what is spared to us, and poor Mr. Collins the first to be pitied, for only think what he is left with now, just when everything had settled so comfortably about him. I do hope he will not be so cast down as to give up the living. It would be a hard thing for Hunsford to go to some stranger when he had as good as made it his own; and a clergyman ought not to be left to himself at such a time, ought he, Mr. Darcy? It is a great mercy he has friends to keep him from sinking under it."

I could have gone through the floor. I set it down to her never having known any better, which was true, and was the gentlest thing I could find to set it down to. Mr. Darcy's eye had come to rest on her while she spoke, and stayed there a moment after she had done.

Mary kept near Mr. Collins the whole of the visit. Of all of us she had the least idea what to say and the most willingness to stay and not say it; she carried his tea to him, and found his volume of sermons when he wanted the steadying of something in his hands, and gave him a grave, plain attention that became the occasion better than my mother's flutter or my own held tongue. I thought only that it was good of her, and like her, and that Mr. Collins inclined toward the one person in the room who was treating his sorrow as the chief thing in it. I did not take the thought any further. There was no cause, that week, to take it anywhere at all.

Mr. Darcy spoke to me only once, and that towards the end of the visit, when the rest had fallen into the low shuffle of leave-taking and the two of us were for a moment outside it. I had looked for nothing from him but more of the same coldness, and was ready to resent it. What he gave me instead was grave condolences, sincerely meant. Then, as though it had been pressing on him the whole visit, he said that there was one part of such a death he could not get past: a young woman had gone down a road she had walked a hundred times, in the afternoon sun, and was struck down and left there. Whoever had done it was gone, and would, in all likelihood, never face justice.

"That is the part I cannot reconcile myself to," he said. "Grief is owed, and one pays it, and in time one goes on. But that such a thing should be done at all, and the doer of it walk off into the world unanswered…that I cannot tolerate."

I had no answer ready. It was not the speech I had braced myself against, and it came nearer to my own unquiet about that road than I would have chosen to let him see, had I understood then that it did. I said I hoped the men would be found, which I did not believe, and which he plainly did not believe either. He inclined his head and said no more. And within the hour I had put the whole of it away under a proud man's wish to be seen feeling the right things more deeply than his neighbours did; for it was the easier thing to think of him than the other, which was that he and I had, for the space of a minute, been uneasy about the very same thing.

The neighbourhood thinned, as neighbourhoods do after a shock. The widow who had lodged the back end of the autumn near the Gouldings' went off one morning to wherever she had been bound, her season among us run out; the militia talked of a remove to Brighton when the spring came; and on the Friday the gentlemen left Netherfield. Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley went together, called away on business that was given no name, and the Miss Bingleys followed inside the week, having endured the country as long as they ever meant to. The house shut up. The blinds came down. Whatever had been beginning between Mr. Bingley and my sister was left to gutter out across fifty miles of road with not a line sent to account for it, and Jane bore that as she bore the other loss, which is to say she grew a little quieter and a little paler and would not, for the world, have had anyone be sorry for her aloud.

I laid it at Mr. Darcy's door. He had carried his friend off from a neighbourhood he scorned and a family he had looked over and found wanting, and if I had wanted any further reading of the man I had only to call up the face he had worn in my mother's drawing-room. It was a great comfort to me, that account of things. It asked nothing of me but to go on disliking a man I already disliked, and it gave my anger a target, which the footpads, whom I would never see, could not.

So there were two empty places in our winter: Charlotte, who would not be turning in at the gate again, and Mr. Bingley, who had gone without a word; and I had not enough of myself to grieve the two of them as each deserved. I gave the most of what I had to Jane, who asked for none of it, and kept what was left for after the candle was out, and went on as one does.

I had promised to come to her in March. The promise did not die with her, though I did not then know it.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 8. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

"I have kept him for you," said my aunt Philips, arriving out of the crush with an officer in tow, "for you are the cleverest of my nieces, and he is much too good for the Miss Longs. Mr. Wickham — my niece, Miss Elizabeth Bennet. There. Now I may see to the negus with my conscience clear."

She was gone on the word, leaving me in possession of a stranger and the better part of a smile I had not yet decided where to bestow.

My aunt had a genius for the kind of evening my mother aspired to: close, loud, overfull, cards laid out in one room and the carpet turned back in the other, the whole of it pitched at exactly the warmth a Meryton parlour holds best. The militia had been quartered among us long enough for novelty to ripen into welcome, and she had gathered as many of the officers as her rooms would hold. She was a happy woman that night. So, very nearly, was everyone.

Mr. Wickham had been in the corps a fortnight, and it took the room about a quarter of an hour to settle that he was the most agreeable man in it. I had reached the verdict five minutes ahead of the room. He had a good face and an easy address, and he listened as though whatever one said to him were the pleasantest thing he had heard that evening; and he turned this upon me so warmly that I gave him my company gladly and counted myself fortunate in the having of it. We fell into the easiest talk I had had in months. He had the happy gift of leaving his companion better pleased with herself than he had found her, and I have never been proof against a man who admires my conversation, thinking rather well of it myself.

Jane was there, and Charlotte too, newly promised and receiving the congratulations of a neighbourhood that had decided, on reflection, to be pleased for her. She wore it well — the composure of a woman who has struck her bargain and means to keep her countenance over it. Mr. Collins attended her closely, fetching and bowing and working in, Lady Catherine de Bourgh wherever she would fit.

It was some way into the evening that the Netherfield party looked in. Mr. Bingley came first through the door, all pleasure, and Mr. Darcy a step behind him, into a room he plainly had no wish to be in. Jane coloured; my mother sat up; and I, having a better object before me than either gentleman, scarcely marked them at all until I saw what passed between Mr. Darcy and the man at my side.

What happened then I saw, and did not understand, and have not since been able to unsee. Mr. Darcy came two steps into the parlour and stopped. Across the heads of the company his eye found Mr. Wickham's, and Mr. Wickham's found his, and for the length of a breath the noise of the room went on without either man in it. Nothing was said. Nothing was done. Mr. Darcy flushed, and his well-cut features grew rigid. Mr. Wickham's smile checked, the colour went out of his face, and he was a moment putting himself to rights. My aunt arrived at Mr. Bingley's elbow, and the moment shut over like water closing.

Mr. Darcy did not cross to Wickham. He crossed to no one. He took a place near the wall and wore there, for the rest of the evening, the look I had seen him wear at the assembly. I was glad to have my low opinion of him so promptly confirmed, and gave the matter no more thought than that. I had pleasanter company to attend to.

When the crowd had closed round us again, Mr. Wickham let his eye follow mine to where Mr. Darcy stood against the wall.

"You are acquainted with the gentleman, I think," he said.

"A little. I cannot say I like him."

Something eased in his face, as though I had spared him the awkwardness of warning me. "You will think it strange in me to say so, but I am not surprised to hear it. I have known him since we were boys. His father was my godfather — the best man I ever knew — and he meant me for the church. There was a living promised me, a good one, that should have been mine when it fell vacant."

"And you did not take orders?"

"I was not suffered to. The living fell in, and was given to another." He turned the glass slowly in his hand. "His father's wishes had been stated plain enough; but a wish is not a bond, and the son and I had never been friends. When the gift of the living came into his hands, he pleased himself. I do not say it to do him harm. For his father's sake I would have the name honoured, and so I hold my tongue, for the most part."

It was the for the most part that undid me — that small, reluctant drawing-back, the discretion of a man who would plainly rather have said nothing at all. I told him it was abominable, and I meant it.

"He has his virtues," Mr. Wickham went on, as though I had not spoken. "He is a good brother; you will hear him called the most attentive of guardians to his sister. I was fond of her once — a sweeter-tempered child never lived, and she would sit an afternoon through for the pleasure of being amused by me. But she is grown now, and they tell me she is very proud, as proud as he is. It is a grief to me. I had hoped the world would leave her as I knew her."

That a man so hardly used should speak of the sister with sorrow and not a word of spite seemed to me the surest token of his own good nature. I had been singled out, from a whole roomful, to be told the truth of a man the rest of the world admired; and there is no flattery to match being trusted, above all by someone whose trust one would like to have. I gave Mr. Wickham the best of my attention for the rest of the evening.

There was an old woman in the corner by the card-room door whom I had marked once already without meaning to. She sat where the chaperones and the visiting aunts sit, a widow by her black, a stranger to me, and she watched the room in a way I had half-noted somewhere before and could not place — openly, letting her look rest on one face and then another and holding it well past the moment a look is removed. It is not a thing women of our sort are suffered to do; we are taught to see sidelong before we are taught much else. I took her for somebody's grand relation down from a part of the world that minded such things less, and I should have forgotten her clean away had I not seen Mr. Wickham see her.

Once his glance went to her corner and stayed a moment before it came back to me. Something there had caught him. He had, as did I, a quick eye for whatever was a little out of the common run. Once, later, the widow's look fell on Mr. Collins, and Mr. Collins, discovering himself attended to by an elderly stranger of no introduction, bowed and bobbed and arranged his features into the deference he kept for his betters. She took it as her due, and went on regarding him after he had turned away.

Charlotte found me in the crush by the window, the way she always could, and we had a few minutes out of the noise.

"You have been very well entertained this hour," she said.

"He is the most agreeable man I have met in a twelvemonth, and he has been shamefully used, and I intend to be wholly partial to him. Do not try to make me just; I am enjoying myself far too much."

"I would not dream of trying." She smiled, but her look had gone across the room to Mr. Collins, who stood by the card-tables pressing his conversation on a man who showed no great hunger for it. "You spend your sympathy freely on strangers. I keep mine for the people I shall have to live beside."

"And how does the man you are to live beside?"

"Restless tonight." She watched him a moment. "He does badly in a room he has not the measure of — he likes to know what is owed, and to whom, and to have paid it before anyone can think the worse of him. At Hunsford he will know. He will be easier, with his own walls round him and Lady Catherine by to tell him where the lines fall." She said it without complaint, a thing she had lately added to her stock of facts about him; and I, who kept no such stock and wanted none, heard only a friend making the best of a bad bargain, and said as much.

"You think I am to be pitied," she said. "I am not. I shall have a house of my own, and a garden, and more hours to myself than either of us has now. There is but one bad entry in the whole account, and it is that I shall be in Kent and you will not."

"Then mend it. Kent is not the moon. I can come to you in the spring, and stay till you are heartily tired of me."

"I shall hold you to every word." She pressed my hand. "And before the spring, and before the wedding has quite swallowed me — I mean to call at Longbourn the day after tomorrow, about two, if your mother can spare me the chair by the fire. There are matters I want settled with you while I still can, and I would far rather settle them with you than with my mother at my elbow."

Mr. Wickham had reached us by then with two glasses of my aunt's negus and Mr. Collins was trailing along in his wake. I laughed, and said come at two and welcome. The arrival of the gentlemen put a stop to further private conversation.

It was later, when the carpet had been cleared and one of the officers' sisters set down at the instrument, that Mr. Darcy did the last thing I looked for, and asked me to dance. I was so far from expecting it that I had said yes before I had consulted myself, and Charlotte, passing close behind, gave me a look I did not trouble to read.

We stood some little time without a word. I had made up my mind that the silence should be his to break, the asking having been his, and was on the point of letting it run the whole half-hour out of pure perversity when I relented so far as to make some remark upon the dance. He answered it, and fell silent again. After a minute I tried him afresh.

"It is your turn to say something now, Mr. Darcy. I have talked of the dance, and you ought to make some remark on the size of the room, or the number of couples."

He smiled, and said that whatever I wished him to say should be said.

"Very well; that will serve for the present. By and by I may observe that private parties are pleasanter than public balls — but for now we may hold our tongues."

"You talk by rule, then, while you dance?"

"Now and again. One must say a little, you know. It would look very odd to stand up half an hour together and never open one's lips; and yet there are some for whose sake a conversation ought to be so contrived that they are put to the trouble of saying as little as may be."

"Are you consulting your own feelings in this, or do you imagine you are gratifying mine?"

"Both," said I, "for I have always seen a great likeness in the turn of our two minds. We are each of us unsocial and out of temper with company, and unwilling to open our mouths but when we expect to say a thing that shall silence the whole room and go down to posterity with all the éclat of a proverb."

"This is no very faithful likeness of yourself, I am sure. How near it may come to me, I cannot pretend to judge. You think it a tolerable portrait, no doubt."

"I must not pronounce upon my own performance."

He made no reply, and we went some way down the dance in silence, so that I supposed we had done with talking; until I — not able to leave the temptation alone — remarked that the militia had brought some very pleasant additions to our neighbourhood, and that I had found Mr. Wickham a most agreeable one.

The words did their work, and more thoroughly than I had bargained for. He went away from me without moving a step. I have no better way to tell it: the man who had been crossing wits with me the instant before was simply not in the room, and in his place stood one attending to something a great way off, behind his own eyes, that had no part in the dance or in me. It held him a breath past his mastering of it. Then he said, in a voice that plainly cost him something to keep level, "Mr. Wickham is blessed with such happy manners as may ensure his making friends wherever he goes. Whether he may be equally fortunate in retaining them, is less certain."

"He has been so unlucky as to lose your friendship," I returned, "and in a manner he is likely to suffer from the whole of his life."

He had no answer to give me, or none that he would give, and we finished the figure on nothing at all.

I was well pleased with myself. I had laid a finger on the proud man's raw place and watched him flinch, and a flinch, to my mind that night, came very near a confession. It suited me to believe so. I had wanted him in the wrong about something — a man carrying that much pride ought not to be permitted any sorrows that were not also sins — and here, at last, he had obliged me.

The evening broke up late, and the breaking up was as warm as the rest of it. Mr. Wickham handed me to the carriage and hoped the regiment would keep him in Meryton long enough to enjoy such neighbours; and I rode home with my head full of him and very little else, well satisfied with an evening in which, as I then reckoned it, nothing of any consequence had happened.

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.

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.