The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 4. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

The distance I had walked was the first thing Netherfield wished to settle about me — before my name was well out of the footman's mouth, and a good while before anyone thought to mention my sister.

"It cannot be less than five miles," said Mr. Bingley, who would always grant a thing its largest reading if the largest reading were the kinder one.

"It is only three," I said.

"Three and a half." This was Mr. Darcy, from near the window, where he had been standing with no apparent intention of joining anything. "You came by the south field. The clay there takes that colour only after heavy rain, and there is burdock at the stile by the second hedge — the burrs on your hem are from it. The footpath by the road would have added the half mile and spared you both. You chose speed, comparatively speaking, over comfort."

"Your knowledge of the country, sir, is impressive on so short an acquaintance."

"Elementary," he said. "Bingley showed me the whole of the property when he came to look it over. A man remembers the ground he has walked."

He said it as a plain fact, the way another man might tell you the time, with no notion that he had done anything to be remarked, and went back to his window.

The ladies of the house then took their turn at the subject. "Three miles and a half," said Miss Bingley, restoring the half mile to me as though it were a debt of honour, "and quite alone! You are an excellent walker, Miss Eliza. I could never be persuaded to it myself."

"That I believe," I said.

"And in such dirt." Mrs. Hurst's eyes went down my petticoat and made a remarkably thorough audit for a woman who appeared to be looking at my face. Six inches of Hertfordshire hung on that hem, and I knew to the inch how much, because the two of them weighed it between them all the while their mouths were being kind. How dreadful the roads. How brave I was. How fortunate that nobody of consequence had seen me climbing stiles.

"It shows an affection for your sister that is very pleasing," said Mr. Bingley, who had heard the words and missed the music, as he reliably did when the music was unkind. He said a thing very like it again not five minutes later, in case anyone had missed it the first time, and then led me upstairs as far as the landing, giving orders for hot water and declaring that I must stay until Jane was well — his sisters would be delighted. His sisters declared themselves delighted, a half-second after the cue.

I had been prepared, climbing that stile, to be sneered at, and I had an answer ready for a sneer. I had none ready for the window. Mr. Bingley had defended me, warmly, visibly, twice, and any soul in the room could have named what he was doing. Mr. Darcy had told the room that I had walked three and a half hard miles for my sister and had the mud to prove it — but his defence wore the dress of arithmetic, and I was in no humour that morning to admire it in such severe garb. I set the man down as proud and strange, and went up to my patient.

Jane was flushed and heavy-eyed and very glad to see me, and sorry for it in the same breath.

"Lizzy. You never walked."

"The whole county is agreed that I did. The mileage has been fixed by committee." I took her hand; it was too warm. "How is the throat?"

"I am a great deal of trouble to everybody."

"You are the only person under this roof who holds that opinion," I said, "and you may keep it to yourself, for it will get no second."

She smiled and was asleep before the hot water came, and the next days arranged themselves around her, as days in a sickroom do. I shall not give an account of each; they had a sameness in the memory. Jane mended slowly. I sat with her, came down when I was wanted and sometimes when I was not, and learned the household by living inside it. Miss Bingley pursued Mr. Darcy about the rooms with a constancy I could almost have admired had its object been worthier of the chase, and Mr. Darcy bore the pursuit with a patience that gave nothing and conceded nothing. When she declared one evening that the library at Pemberley could have no equal in the kingdom, he said without looking up that there were two better at Oxford, and turned his page. I found such moments more instructive than I let on to myself.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 3. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

"Kitty," said my mother, the moment the breakfast things were cleared, "I want you upstairs. Lydia, go with her. Mary — your father has been asking for you."

My father had asked for nobody, and would have paid handsomely to go on asking for nobody, but Mary went. I had half risen myself when my mother fixed me where I stood.

"Lizzy, you will stay. Mr. Collins has something to say to you."

"Mr. Collins can have nothing to say to me that my sisters may not hear."

"You will stay, Lizzy. I insist upon it." And she was gone, and the door closed on the last of my sisters with the soft click of a thing that has been oiled in advance.

I should have seen it laid. I had grown up inside my mother's campaigns and could generally make out the shape of one before she had finished the first manoeuvre — and this one had been in the field for two days already. An invitation had come from Miss Bingley for Jane to dine at Netherfield, the gentlemen engaged elsewhere; and my mother, consulting the sky with the satisfaction of a woman who had read it correctly, refused Jane the carriage and sent her the three miles on the old riding horse. It came on to rain before she was halfway. Jane was kept the night, and my mother bore her triumph as she bore all her triumphs, aloud and at the table. With Mr. Bingley thus secured to her eldest daughter — for so the arithmetic already stood, in her ledger — Mr. Collins had been quietly transferred from Jane to me, and had accepted the reassignment without a flicker. A man genuinely attached to my sister might have shown some small reluctance to move the attachment overnight; he showed none, and I set it down to feelings shallow enough to be poured from one vessel to another without spilling. I had the explanation entirely backwards, but it served me for a great many months.

All of which is to say that I was alone in the breakfast-room with Mr. Collins, and the door was shut, and he was clearing his throat.

"Believe me, my dear Miss Elizabeth," he began, "that your modesty, so far from doing you any disservice, rather adds to your other perfections."

"Mr. Collins—"

"You can hardly doubt the purport of my discourse. Almost as soon as I entered the house I singled you out as the companion of my future life." He held up a hand against interruption, having evidently rehearsed the interruption as well. "But before I am run away with by my feelings, it may be advisable to state my reasons for marrying. Firstly, that it is the duty of a clergyman in easy circumstances to set the example of matrimony in his parish. Secondly, that I am convinced it will add very greatly to my happiness. And thirdly — which perhaps I ought to have mentioned earlier — that it is the express advice and recommendation of the very noble lady whom I have the honour of calling patroness."

He paused there, as a man pauses at the best prospect on his property.

"'Mr. Collins,'" he said, in what I understood to be an imitation of her ladyship, "'you must marry. A clergyman like you must marry. Choose properly. Choose a gentlewoman, for my sake; and for your own, let her be an active, useful sort of person, not brought up high, but able to make a small income go a good way. Find such a woman as soon as you can, bring her to Hunsford, and I will visit her.' Allow me to observe, my fair cousin, that the notice and kindness of Lady Catherine de Bourgh are not the least of the advantages in my power to offer."

"You are too hasty, sir," I said. "You forget that I have made no answer. Let me make it now. Accept my thanks for the compliment you are paying me. I am very sensible of the honour of your proposals, but it is impossible for me to do otherwise than decline them."

"I am not now to learn," said Mr. Collins, with a wave of the hand that forgave me everything, "that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept, when he first applies for their favour. I am therefore by no means discouraged, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere long."

"Upon my word, sir, your hope is an extraordinary one after my declaration. I am perfectly serious in my refusal."

"You would be refusing a respectable establishment. You may not be aware that it is by no means certain another offer of marriage will ever be made you. I must conclude that you mean to increase my love by suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females."

"Elegant females may plague whom they choose, sir. I am a rational creature, and I have now told you the truth three times. I shall not improve it on a fourth telling."

"You are uniformly charming!" cried Mr. Collins.

I have had occasion since to be argued with by some formidable people, and I have never again met anything so impregnable as Mr. Collins in love. There was no purchase on the man anywhere. Refusal ran off him like rain off new slate, each fresh declaration absorbed into the general proof of my delicacy; and I was driven at last from the room, having achieved nothing in a quarter of an hour but three refusals and the loss of my temper, to find my mother stationed in the hall at the exact distance the door's acoustics would have recommended to her.

What followed was loud, and most of it was addressed to me. I was a headstrong, foolish girl who did not know my own interest; I would be made to know it; she would not be crossed in this, Lizzy, she would not. It was at this point that Mr. Collins emerged from the room behind me, bewildered and embarrassed by the scene in front of him. My mother ran on, telling me that headstrong girls who refused respectable establishments might find their mothers done with them altogether. And gathering herself to deliver the decisive stroke, she flew to the library to fetch the one authority in the house who outranked her.

My father came as far as the library door and surveyed the field — my mother at full sail, Mr. Collins arranging his features into injured dignity, and me, in the middle of it, with my temper gone.

"An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth," he said. "From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do."

It was not kind to my mother, and he knew it, and he said it anyway, because the alternative was to let the thing grind on for a week; and underneath the wit, which the room received as wit, a man had taken my side. He withdrew. The door closed. My mother was left to discover, by degrees, that the matter had been decided against her in eleven seconds, and that she had carried the deciding vote to the wrong tribunal.

Mr. Collins bore his rejection with great dignity for slightly under a minute.

His equanimity restored itself with a speed I had attributed, at the time, to the shallowness of his attachment. He grew formal. He resigned his pretensions in the rounded periods of a man reading the eulogy of a connexion he had not much liked. By the time Charlotte Lucas was shown in — and she arrived, as she so often did, at the exact moment the room most wanted a sensible person in it — he had recovered enough to be gracious about my unworthiness.

Charlotte took the management of the room out of my hands without appearing to take anything at all.

"You bear it wonderfully, Mr. Collins," she said, and had him telling her of Rosings before the tea was poured. Was the park very extensive? It was. And her ladyship took an interest in the parish — in the cottagers, the school? Her ladyship's attention reached everything; Miss Lucas could scarcely conceive the minuteness of it. Charlotte said she was sure she could not, and asked another question, and another, each one a small door held open for him to walk through talking; and I was left free at the window to recover my temper, which wanted the whole of the quarter-hour. She was good at this, I told myself — at smoothing the feathers of foolish men — and I left the observation there, where it sat quietly for a fortnight before it taught me anything.

I had not been at the window long when a horse came up the drive.

It was our own riding horse, led by a Netherfield servant, and the note he carried was from Jane. She was unwell — a sore throat, a fever, a headache; nothing to alarm us, she wrote, in the careful hand of a person trying not to alarm anyone; Miss Bingley would not hear of her leaving. My mother, whose scheme had now answered beyond anything she had dared to hope, received the news with perfect serenity and observed that people did not die of trifling colds, and that Jane could be in no better hands.

I had less faith in colds that made Jane so careful about not alarming us. The carriage was not to be had — my mother wanted it later, and besides, a daughter arriving in a carriage could be sent home in one. I said I would walk. Three miles, and the lanes deep after the rain; behind me, as I went for my boots, Mr. Collins had begun explaining to Charlotte the exact degree of concern it was proper to feel for a young lady's sore throat.

I took the short way, across the south field, and arrived at Netherfield with a petticoat that had a great deal to say about the journey.

I did not know, setting out, how closely it would be read.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 2. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

"And what," said Charlotte Lucas, appearing at my elbow with two cups of punch before the first dance had ended, "is a Mr. Collins? Maria swears your mother has one staying at Longbourn, and my mother is in agonies for want of facts."

"He is my father's cousin," I said, "and heir to Longbourn after him, the estate being entailed away from us girls. He has lately taken orders, and got a living in Kent from a great lady called Lady Catherine de Bourgh, of whom you are to hear a very great deal whether you wish it or not. He has come to look us over."

"To look you over."

"He calls it an olive branch. I believe he means to choose a wife from among us, and feels that the entail entitles him to one, the way it entitles him to the silver."

"That is not the worst arrangement a woman might make."

"You have not heard him on the subject of his patroness."

"I have heard worse men on smaller subjects," said Charlotte, "and known them make easy enough husbands once the courting was done. A clergyman with a living, and an estate to come, is not nothing, Eliza, whatever he sounds like across a supper table."

This was an old argument between us, and I had never once won it, so I directed her attention to the man himself instead.

The assembly rooms at Meryton were never large, and that night they were smaller still, for half the county had crowded in to be disappointed by them. I have been in finer rooms since, and colder ones, and one or two I would give a good deal never to have entered at all; but I remember that room as it stood that evening, low-ceilinged and over-warm and loud, the whole neighbourhood having got hold of a single piece of news and resolved to make a winter of it. The news was that Mr. Bingley had taken Netherfield, was young, was unmarried, and had five thousand a year. My mother had it by heart within an hour of its arrival — five thousand, Mr. Bennet, and very likely more — and had recited it across the breakfast table every morning for a fortnight. My father received these communications as he received most of her communications, from behind a book; and he received the assembly itself by staying home with it.

Mr. Collins had attached himself that evening to Jane, the eldest and the handsomest of us, the entail having furnished him a choice he meant to make from the top down. Charlotte and I drifted near enough to hear him at the work. He had arrived at the chimney-piece in the drawing-room at Rosings Park.

"—eight hundred pounds, Miss Bennet. I have the figure from her ladyship herself. Eight hundred pounds, for the chimney-piece alone."

"It must be very fine," said Jane.

"It is beyond anything I could convey. I despair of conveying it."

He did not, however, despair of attempting it, and was some minutes about the work. Jane bore it with the sweetness she brought to everything, including bores; and I loved her for it, and did not envy her, and drew Charlotte off before I could be caught laughing at my own kin.

Then Mr. Bingley came in, and the chimney-piece ceased to matter, though nobody yet knew it.

He was everything the neighbourhood had ordered and a degree warmer than it had dared hope — easy, open, quick to be pleased, the kind of young man who enters a strange room as though it has been got up entirely for his enjoyment and is delighted to find his friends already in it. He was introduced down the line of us, declared he had never met with pleasanter people or prettier girls in his life, and was believed, because he so plainly believed it himself. He danced every dance. And within the half-hour he had found Jane, and after that he found very little else.

I watched it happen from one dance away: a beloved sister and a likeable stranger discovering one another in public, each convinced they were the soul of discretion. He brought her lemonade she had not asked for — the second man that evening to bring her a drink unasked, and the first to be thanked with a blush. He stood up with her twice, which in Meryton was very nearly a banns-reading. My mother watched the same scene from across the room, and I saw the very moment her eye left Jane and travelled to Mr. Collins, and from Mr. Collins to me; and I understood that I had just been promoted in the order of business.

For the present, however, I was occupied with Mr. Bingley's friend.

He had come in at Mr. Bingley's shoulder and had not warmed by a single degree in the hour since. Mr. Darcy was the taller man and the handsomer, with a keen aquiline face and piercing blue eyes; he had ten thousand a year to Bingley's five; and the room had established all of this and then fallen out of love with him inside ten minutes, on the grounds that he would not dance, would not be pleased, and looked at Meryton as a man looks at weather he must presently go out into. I had given him no great share of my attention once it was clear he considered himself above his company. I record this so that what follows may be understood to have been entirely his own doing.

I was resting between dances, half hidden by the angle of a pillar. The wall of seated women lay in my view — the chaperones, the visiting aunts, the ladies past dancing — and among them a stranger I took for someone's formidable relation up from the country, a widow by her dress, who held her chair as though the room had been set out around it and watched the dancers with an openness no woman of the gentry is taught to allow herself, keeping one face and then another past the moment courtesy returns a look to its owner. Mr. Bingley had come up to his friend a few feet from me, flushed from the dance and bent on sharing his good fortune.

"Come, Darcy. I must have you dance. I hate to see you standing about by yourself in this stupid manner."

"You know how I detest it, unless I am acquainted with my partner."

"I would not be so fastidious as you are for a kingdom! Upon my honour, I never met with so many pleasant girls in my life as I have this evening — and several of them uncommonly pretty."

"You have been dancing with the only handsome girl in the room."

"She is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld! But there is one of her sisters sitting down just behind you, who is very pretty, and I dare say very agreeable. Do let me ask my partner to introduce you."

Mr. Darcy looked at me. It was a brief but unhurried look. I have been looked at a great many ways in my life, but never before, that I could remember, as a question someone was working out.

"I think not," he said. "I cannot suppose Miss Elizabeth Bennet would be tolerable company. Her father I take to be a gentleman of a reclusive type, who cannot be bothered with social events. And her mother is clearly the spoiled and ignorant younger daughter of someone in trade. A country attorney, I would guess."

He said it quietly, and not unkindly, and that was the whole of the trouble. There was no spite in it. He was not paying me out for a slight, nor jabbing at his friend for dragging him to the ball. He had looked at me, read off what I came from as another man might read a signpost, and concluded that the destination of our acquaintance would not be worth the journey. And in his guesses as to my family he was unfortunately correct. My father did despise the assembly and was at home with his books. My mother was the younger daughter of a Meryton attorney and was, that very evening and at some volume, both of the other things he had named her.

I had expected, if ever I were to be slighted by such a man, to be told I was plain. Every woman keeps an answer ready for that, and a witty one keeps three. I had no answer ready for being read correctly and found not worth the reading; the sting of it had an edge I had not met before, and I disliked him from that moment with an interest I should have found harder to account for than I cared to try. I gave my attention back to the room and resolved to think no more of him — a resolution I kept for the better part of an hour.

What I did with the hour was tell the story. I told it as a joke against a proud man — the gentleman from town who could name your grandfather's profession at twenty paces and found nothing in the room worth standing up with — and it earned the laugh it was built for, every time, which was the only shape I could bear to give it. Charlotte heard the performance twice before she had it from me plainly, behind the pillar, with the laugh left off.

She did not look surprised.

"He is right about your father, you know," she said.

"Charlotte."

"And about your mother at these things. You have said as much yourself, and worse."

"When I say it, it is filial honesty. When he says it, it is ten thousand a year being clever at a country assembly."

"A man who says only true things and none of them kind is a tiresome guest. I grant you that. But I would rather sit by a man who sees clearly and holds his tongue half the time than by one who flatters and sees nothing at all. You will meet a great many more of the second kind than the first." She took my arm. "Now stop attending to the one man in the room who will not dance with you, and come and watch your sister fall in love. It is by far the better entertainment."

It was, and we watched it together until the musicians were sent home.

The carriage afterward held the seven of us and my mother's happiness, which wanted the greater room. Twice, Jane — he had stood up with her twice, and his sisters so elegant, and five thousand a year, and her father should hear every word of it that night whether he would or no. Jane ventured that Mr. Bingley was just what a young man ought to be, and blushed in the dark where she thought it could not be seen. Mr. Collins pronounced the evening a credit to the neighbourhood, though inferior, he must in honesty observe, to the assemblies at Rosings; that her ladyship attended no assemblies did not appear to weaken the comparison for him.

And then my mother fell silent for the length of a mile, which was so far against her custom that I looked over. She was studying Mr. Collins. Then she turned and looked at me down the length of the carriage, the way she looked at a room before she rearranged the furniture in it.

I knew that look of old, and I knew there was no arguing with what came behind it.

But that kept until morning.