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.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 5. Narrated by Bingley, from his diary.

The following is the first of several leaves I have taken from a private journal kept by my great-grandfather, Mr. Charles Bingley, which reached me through my wife's labours among the family papers. I set them in where Mrs. Darcy's account, by the nature of the thing, could not see. A word upon the document, once and then never again. My great-grandfather wrote as he talked, at the gallop, his words running one into the next, his stops left out altogether, and his blots standing in for whatever stops he might otherwise have made. I have ventured the punctuation and left the rest to him. — J. H. W.

* * *

Netherfield Park, the 15th of November

We were out the whole of the morning after the birds, and I have never in my life seen shooting like Darcy's and never shall. He does not appear to try at it. He puts the gun up as though he only meant to point a thing out to you across the field, and the bird comes down, and he has the next one before I have got my own heart back into me — and he takes no more pleasure in it than a man takes in setting down his hat. I brought home two brace and was as pleased as a schoolboy and said so, and he said they were good birds, which from Darcy is a speech, and I went warm on it the rest of the day. The dogs worked beautifully. There is a young liver-and-white bitch of mine, Juno, that I had half a mind to leave at home for green, and she quartered that ground like a duchess and shamed the old dog outright. I shall keep her by me all the season now. I mention all this first because it was the best of the day and I would rather write it than the other thing.

The other thing was said on the walk back, in the mild way Darcy has when he has settled a matter already and is only being kind about the telling of it.

"You know how Miss Bennet came to be under your roof," he said. He did not put it as a question.

"She came to dine and was caught in the rain and was too poorly to go home. The whole house knows it."

"That is what happened," he said. "How it came about is another thing." And then he laid it out for me the way he lays out everything, one thing set down after the next and so close together that a man can find no room to get in between them.

"The invitation was for the one evening we three were engaged from home to the officers. A lady asked for that night sits down with your sisters, and is handed back into her carriage, and is gone before ever we return — unless she should be kept."

"She might have been asked for any night," I said.

"She came on horseback. Longbourn keeps a carriage, she is the eldest daughter of the house, and she was sent the three miles on the old riding horse in spite of both."

"The carriage may have been wanted elsewhere—"

"Under that sky? There was rain standing in it from breakfast, and any man who has kept a season in the country could have read it off the morning." He let that go a step before he set the last of it down. "A lady put up on a horse under a wet sky, three miles from her own door. The rain was the design. Mrs. Bennet sent her daughter out to be caught in it and kept."

"That is a hard thing to lay on a mother who only wants her girls well settled," I said.

"I lay nothing hard on her. It was a stroke of generalship, and I admire it." We walked a little way. "A scheme wants two to work it, Bingley. Mrs. Bennet may load the piece, but Miss Bennet had to walk out under that sky and let herself be sent. A daughter who will do so much — who will be pointed at a rich man and marched at him through the wet because her mother wishes it — will marry where her mother directs her. A man she likes well enough. She will never trouble to ask herself whether she likes him best."

I had no word ready, and he said the rest of it plainly, as a thing he had reasoned and not a thing he took any pleasure in reaching.

"That is your Miss Bennet. Amiable, biddable, and her heart not greatly in the business either way."

Well. I could not sit under the whole of that, and I said so.

"You have reasoned yourself clean past the one article that signifies," I told him, "which is Jane herself. There is no scheming anywhere in her. She would sooner walk to Scotland than manoeuvre a man a single inch. If she was in the rain, she was in it because she had been asked, and would not give the pain of a refusal."

"Then how do you explain the decision to ride a horse out under that sky?"

"I have no answer to the horse and the sky, and I will not pretend to one." He had me there, and I knew it as I spoke. "But you have proved how she came to be wet, and you have not come within a mile of what she is. That part you are guessing at, and guessing low."

He heard me out. He always hears me out. What I did not say to him — what I will set here and nowhere else — is that if Jane cares for me, she cares on my own account and by no arithmetic of her mother's.

"I hope you are right," he said at last, in the voice of a man who has settled privately that you are not.

There is a saying of Darcy's, that a man may look at a thing the whole of his life and never once observe it. You see, he says, but you do not observe. I had that put to me tonight without his troubling to aim it, and it went home all the same. For I have sat beside Mrs. Bennet across a dozen dinners and seen a fond, silly, kindly woman fussing over her girls, and observed nothing whatever underneath it — and here is Darcy reading her off like a printed page while I sat at her elbow and studied my dinner. So it may be he sees where I am blind. But seeing is not the whole of a man, and there are things a fellow takes in by an instrument that is not his eyes, and about Jane I will back my instrument against his any night of the week and think the wager safe.

I mean to think no more of it. I observe that I have now told this page as much twice over, which is once more than a thing wants telling if it is going to hold. Darcy is below at piquet with Caroline, losing on purpose to be let alone. I shall go down to him. The birds were very fine.

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.