Chapter 3
Chapter Three
The book came back on Thursday morning, carried again by a Netherfield servant, with no note.
No note was, Elizabeth decided, either very good or very bad.
She took it to the window of the parlour and opened it, expecting — she was not quite sure what she expected.
Correction, perhaps. A dry remark in the front matter about the practice of writing in other people's books.
Possibly nothing; possibly he had read it as a borrower should and left it entirely clean and she had spent three days manufacturing anticipation out of nothing.
The pages turned under her thumb and she saw the first mark.
Pencil, not ink. His hand, unmistakably — small, even, upright, the hand she had watched on the writing-table at Netherfield. Beside her note about solitude and the practice of it, he had written: The distinction is just. He confuses the condition for the discipline.
Elizabeth read it twice and laughed — because it was right, and because he had put it so dryly, and because of course he had gone straight for the most arguable note in the volume and improved on it.
She turned the pages.
He had not overrun the book. That was the first thing — she had half-feared a thoroughgoing rebuttal from a man with opinions and leisure, and what she found instead was restraint so deliberate it had a character of its own.
Ten or twelve marks, perhaps, in pencil, spaced across the whole volume.
Most of them brief: a word or two, a dry disagreement, once a single question mark beside her note about the dog poem that she was absolutely going to make him explain in person.
She found herself smiling without having decided to.
And then she turned to the poem on domesticity, the one where she had written her longest and, she now realized, her most unguarded note — the some days the garden is enough note, the one she had written on a grey October afternoon when she had not expected anyone to see it — and stopped.
He had left nothing beside it. No mark, no note, no pencil.
But the page had been opened many times; she could feel it in the spine, the way a much-read page gives differently than its neighbours.
And then she looked more carefully, and saw at the top margin, very small, in pencil so light it was almost not there:
I had not considered it so. I should have.
Elizabeth stood very still.
Eight words, in pencil, in the margin of a poem about gardens, by a man she had once decided was incapable of attending to anyone.
The parlour door opened.
"Lizzy, the book is back?" Her mother swept in, drawn by the servant's arrival or by instinct, it was impossible to know which.
"Let me see — is there a note? Is he coming today?
Because I have told Hill about the seedcake, and if he is not coming today the seedcake will have been entirely wasted?—"
"There is no note, Mama."
"No note! What does it mean, no note? A man sends a book back with no note?—"
"It means," said Elizabeth, closing the volume gently and holding it against her chest in a way she intended to examine later, "that he returns books like a Christian and trusts the book to speak for itself."
Mrs. Bennet was not entirely satisfied with this but was diverted at that moment by Lydia, who had found a way to make the ball arrangements worse, and Elizabeth slipped upstairs before the full accounting could be taken.
She went upstairs with the Cowper under her arm.
She sat at the writing-table and read the marks from the beginning, slowly this time, without the interruption of Mrs. Bennet below.
Dry, attentive, occasionally unwilling to agree.
Taken together they had a voice; and the one passage without a mark had instead something quieter — the acknowledgment of a man who knew when he had been shown something real.
He had read her book. He had argued with it honestly, in a hand she was beginning to know.
He had found her most unguarded note and instead of saying nothing, had said the one thing that was both an acknowledgment and its own small confession.
I had not considered it so. He had not considered contentment enough.
He had considered it differently since. Since what, the note did not say; but she was not without resources for inference, and she suspected the answer would require him to say it in person.
She put the book back on the table. Looked at it. Her own volume, returned from Netherfield with eight new words in it, and a question mark she intended to make him explain.
She would see, she thought, what he did next.