Page 11 of Hard Home

The boy protested that she should not; she continued to declare that she would; and the argument ended only with the visit.

Chapter Six

The ladies of Longbourn soon waited on those of Netherfield. The visit was returned in due form. Miss Bennet's pleasing manners grew on the good will of Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley; and though the mother was found to be intolerable and the younger sisters not worth speaking to, a wish of being better acquainted withthemwas expressed toward the two eldest. By Jane this attention was received with the greatest pleasure; but Elizabeth still saw superciliousness in their treatment of every body, hardly excepting even her sister, and could not like them.

That they should admire Jane was, however, no wonder. It cost them nothing to be near her, and everything near her was easier, and neither lady had the smallest idea why she enjoyed those mornings so much.

Elizabeth knew, and said nothing, and was not proud of the silence.

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"It may perhaps be pleasant," said Charlotte, "to be able to impose on the public in such a case. But it is sometimes a disadvantage to be so very guarded. If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him; and it will then be but poor consolation to believe the world equally in the dark. Your sister is not guarded. That is what is so cruel about it. She is not concealing anything at all."

"Then what is she doing?"

"She is doing what she does to a frightened horse," said Charlotte. "Lizzy, think. What is it that Jane's giftdoes? It makes a thing calm. It does not choose. It does not know that Mr. Bingley is Mr. Bingley and Mrs. Long is Mrs. Long. It goes out ofher upon everybody in the room alike, and it smooths, and what it smooths most thoroughly is Jane."

Elizabeth was quiet.

"She is in love with him," Charlotte went on. "You know it, I know it, your mother has known it since the second dance and has told half the county. And when he looks at her, he sees a young woman who is composed, and pleasant, and glad to see him — precisely as composed and pleasant and glad as she is to see the apothecary. She could not show him more if she wished to. It is not shyness. It is the gift, sitting on top of her, ironing her flat."

"That is a horrible thing to say of her."

"It is a horrible thing to be." Charlotte shrugged. "And Bingley is not a clever man. He is a good one, which is rarer and worth more, but he will not solve a puzzle that has been made this hard. He will wait to be shown. And Jane will go on being unable to show him, and beinglovelyabout it, and if there is anybody near him with a reason to sayshe does not care for you—"

"There is not."

"There is a friend," said Charlotte, "of ten thousand a year, who says almost nothing, and watches everything, and is the only person in this county whose judgment that young man has never once set aside."

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Of this, Elizabeth was perfectly unaware. To her he was only the man who made himself agreeable no where, and who had not thought her handsome enough to dance with.

Mr. Darcy had at first scarcely allowed her to be pretty; he had looked at her without admiration at the ball; and when they next met, he looked at her only to criticize. But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendereduncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes.

He would have said, if anyone had been able to make him say it, that the difficulty was this: shelookedat people.

There is nothing in the world so rare. Ten thousand a year buys a man a great deal and one of the things it buys, absolutely and for ever, is that nobody will ever look at him again. They look at the coat, and the horses, and the eight hundred years, and they arrange their faces before he is within twenty feet, and by nine-and-twenty Darcy had come to think of a room as a sort of weather that happened when he entered it and stopped when he left.

Elizabeth Bennet looked at him.

He could feel it. That was the other thing, and it was not a thing he had ever felt before and he had no name for it: a light, dry, attentive pressure, quite brief, like a hand laid flat against a wall to test for damp. It had happened at the assembly, some seconds after he had said the unforgivable thing, and it had happened twice at Lucas Lodge, and each time he had known the exact moment it stopped.

He had spent his life being looked past. He was not at all prepared to discover how much he minded it, or how violently he did not mind this.

To this discovery succeeded some others. He had detected, with a critical eye, more than one failure of perfect symmetry in her form; he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness.

Of this she was perfectly unaware; — to her he was only the man who made himself agreeable no where.

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He began to wish to know more of her, and as a step toward conversing with her himself, attended to her conversation with others. His doing so drew her notice. It was at Sir William Lucas's, where a large party were assembled.

"What does Mr. Darcy mean," said she to Charlotte, "by listening to my conversation with Colonel Forster?"

"That is a question which Mr. Darcy only can answer."

"But if he does it any more I shall certainly let him know that I see what he is about. He has a very satirical eye, and if I do not begin by being impertinent myself, I shall soon grow afraid of him."