CHAPTER 1 #2
"You have said as much before, and I have not disputed it.
I will say, however, since you are disposed to complain of him at length, that a man with ten thousand a year is generally permitted a great deal of unpleasantness, and I do not know that Mr. Darcy has done anything so very dreadful beyond declining to dance and looking as though the whole assembly bored him past bearing. "
Elizabeth shook her head precipitously. "He called me tolerable, within my own hearing, and did not bother to lower his voice for the delivering of it."
Charlotte looked at her friend with empathy, and nodded her head in sisterly agreement, before stating plainly, "That was unhandsome of him, though I collect you have contrived to be tolerably diverted by the insult regardless, given how many times you have now told the story."
Elizabeth laughed, despite herself, and allowed that this was probably true, and the two of them sat some while longer in the window's relative quiet, watching the room's general business proceed without them.
Sir William moved from guest to guest with his usual unhurried pleasure in his own hospitality, Maria Lucas persuaded, with very little persuasion required, to play something at the instrument in the corner, Mrs. Bennet's voice rising, at intervals, above the general conversation to make some fresh observation upon the excellence of Mr. Bingley's manners, or his fortune, or the particular attention he had shown Jane, each observation delivered with a confidence that suggested she considered the matter very nearly settled already.
Charlotte leaned closer to speak closer to her friend’s ear. "Your mother has married Jane to Mr. Bingley a dozen times already this morning, by my count, and it is not yet noon."
"She has been at it since before breakfast," Elizabeth said, under her breadth. "I begin to think she means to have the banns read by Sunday if the rest of us do not intervene."
Charlotte looked over to where Jane sat, next to Kitty. "And what does Jane say to it?"
"Very little. She admits it a fine thing he asked her twice to dance, and that this is not nothing, and then she asks whether I think it will rain, and I am left to conclude.
" Elizabeth glanced, following Charlotte’s gaze, across the room to where Jane sat, composed and lovely and giving away, to any observer less practised than her own sister, nothing whatsoever of what she felt.
"I do not doubt she is happy. I have watched her long enough to read it plainly.
I only wish, sometimes, that she troubled herself to say a little more of it, to him if not to the rest of us. "
Charlotte considered Elizaebth’s words, and remained silent for a time.
"You give her too much credit for concealment, I think, and not enough for good sense," she said.
"Jane has the advantage of you there, Eliza, whatever disadvantage her reticence may cost her elsewhere. A woman who shews her whole heart before it is asked for generally finds it thought less of for the shewing.”
Elizabeth nodded her head, seemingly agreeing with Charlotte. “I do not say Jane is wise to hide it so thoroughly as she does, only that I understand why she might choose caution over display, in a world that does not reward the display half so well as it pretends to."
"Perhaps it is," Charlotte said, with the particular dry frankness Elizabeth had always valued in her above almost anyone else's more comfortable flattery.
"I have never found that wisdom and warmth keep company so often as the novels would have us believe. But I did not say Jane was wrong to practise it.” Then, turning back towards her friend, Charlotte teased, “You would have told the whole room by now, Eliza, had it been you Mr. Bingley singled out twice in one evening. Jane is not made as you are made."
Meanwhile, Sir William, drawn by some current in the conversation arrived at the window seat to inform them both, with his usual satisfaction, that he understood the Netherfield party meant to remove to town within the sennight, Mr. Bingley's sisters being eager, he collected, for the superior society London could offer over what even so charming a neighbourhood as this one could presently supply.
"To town?" Elizabeth repeated, feeling a dose of shock and confusion.
“How could that be?” She asked bluntly, giving no concern for the comings and goings of Mr. Darcy, a man she had found, upon their single dance together, almost entirely disagreeable to her own tastes, and all her concern upon Mr. Bingley, and his particular attachment to her sister.
"So I am given to understand," Sir William said, "though I collect it is no very great remove, town being scarcely a day's journey, and I do not doubt they will return again before the season is very much older."
She gave no thought at all, asking it, to the comings and goings of Mr. Darcy, a man she had found, upon their single dance together, almost entirely disagreeable to her own tastes, and thoroughly deserving of whatever distance he cared to put between himself and a neighbourhood he had scarcely troubled to be civil to.
Her whole concern was for Mr. Bingley, and for the particular, unmistakable attachment he had shewn her sister not twelve hours before, an attachment that did not, on any reasonable accounting, look like the sort of thing a gentleman abandoned for the mere superior amusements of town.
"I am sure that he will return, Eliza. Now, look, you see Jane there," Charlotte said, quietly, following the direction of Elizabeth's gaze.
"She will say nothing of it. She will smile, and ask whether it looks like rain, and go home this afternoon exactly as composed as she arrived, and you will be the only person in the county who knows, from the stillness of her hands just now, that she minded the news at all. "
"I do see it," Elizabeth said, low, and found that whatever satisfaction the morning's gossip had offered her had gone rather flatter for the finding, replaced by a small, protective anger on her sister's behalf that she did not yet have any proper object to direct it toward, though she suspected, watching Miss Bingley's name mentioned somewhere in the same current of conversation that had produced Sir William's news, that she would not have to wait very long before one presented itself.