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.