Chapter 6
Chapter Six
She did not answer at once.
He observed her not answering, and found he could read the delay.
She was not weighing whether to refuse him.
She was weighing what it was; and that was just, for they both knew the size of it.
A morning's conversation in a library could be explained away by weather.
A call could not. A call at Longbourn was made in front of mothers.
There was no construction of a call that left matters where they stood.
That was, in fact, why he had asked for it.
He had worked the sum standing at the fire, while Caroline Bingley discharged her artillery and he watched Elizabeth Bennet decline to flinch under it.
The fortnight's policy lay in ruins about him — attention is not attachment had not survived the window-seat.
Distance had failed. Silence had ended with his telling her about the fortress, God help him, a thing he had never told Bingley in seven years.
There remained only the truth: that his objections — they were not gone; they would keep — had been objections to everything around her and nothing whatever in her; and that he had rather face the whole percussion of Mrs. Bennet's nerves than hand this woman into a carriage tomorrow and trust to chance for the rest.
"You are direct, sir, once you begin," said Elizabeth at last, softly, giving him back his own; and then, with the rallying look coming up in her eyes like light: "I am trying to picture it, Mr. Darcy.
You. In my mother's parlour. Of your own free will.
You are aware — I ask in simple charity — of what you would be walking into?
You have seen my family only on its public behaviour. "
"I have been calculating that for half an hour."
"And?"
"And I find the arithmetic does not signify," said Darcy.
"I have spent my whole life doing sums of that kind before deciding what I felt, and I have watched the method fail a friend of mine within this very fortnight, and I am done with it.
The drawing-room may be what it likes. I should be calling on you. "
Elizabeth Bennet looked at him for the space of three heartbeats with an expression he had no name for — later, much later, she would tell him it had been the sensation of a prejudice breaking up underfoot like spring ice, and that she had not known whether to call out for help — and then she looked down at the county history in her lap, and turned it over, and was quiet.
"I have been wrong about you once, Mr. Darcy," she said at last, and her voice was not quite as level as she would have liked. "It cost me only my vanity, and I could spare that. I am less certain what being wrong about you twice would cost."
"Nothing," said Darcy. "I will not give you cause. That is not gallantry, Miss Bennet; it is the only promise I am perfectly sure of keeping."
She laughed then — not at him at all; he could tell the difference now.
"Then you had better come on Tuesday," she said. "We are at home on Tuesdays. All of us, Mr. Darcy. Profusely."
"Tuesday," said Darcy, and bowed himself out of the library while the campaign was won, like a sensible commander; and stood in the hall for some moments before he could remember what letters were.