Page 131 of Hard Home

"She has everything explained to her that is proper," said Lady Catherine.

"I see."

"You do not see anything at all. You are two-and-twenty."

"I am two-and-twenty," said Elizabeth, "and I have been told this summer exactly what my father is, and what my sister Jane has been doing since she was four, and what was done to my sister Lydia on a hill above Brighton, and I would not undo one hour of the telling. It has been the worst three months of my life and I have not once wished to be back on the other side of it.

"Your daughter is nine-and-twenty. She has been kept full for nine-and-twenty years like a jar in a cellar, and nobody has ever asked her whether she would rather have spent some of it on a dog."

"That is enough."

"It is a very great deal less than enough," said Elizabeth, "but I have finished."

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Lady Catherine got up.

"We will come to the point," she said, "and then I shall go. I am not going to argue with you about my child; you are impertinent and you are also — " she stopped, and did not finish it. "I want one thing and then you shall never see me again.

"You will promise me that you will never enter into an engagement with my nephew."

There it was.

It came so exactly as it had been described to her in a lane in Kent in May — the plain thing, at the end, phrased so that a well-bred girl could hardly refuse it without being uncivil to an old woman — that Elizabeth felt the whole of the last four monthsgo over her at once, and had to wait a moment before she could speak.

"I will make no promise of the kind."

"Miss Bennet, I am shocked and astonished. I expected to find a more reasonable young woman. But do not deceive yourself into a belief that I shall ever recede. I shall not go away, till you have given me the assurance I require."

"And I certainlynevershall give it. I am not to be intimidated into anything so wholly unreasonable."

"You refuse, then, to oblige me. You refuse to obey the claims of duty, honor, and gratitude. You are determined to ruin him in the opinion of all his friends, and make him the contempt of the world."

"Neither duty, nor honor, nor gratitude," replied Elizabeth, "have any possible claim on me, in the present instance. No principle of either would be violated by my marriage with Mr. Darcy."

"It is not merely his standing. Miss Bennet, attend to me, because I am going to say the true thing and you may make what you like of it." Lady Catherine's voice had changed. "Your blood is failing. Not you; the whole of it. There is a keeping under this county coming apart and your family is inside it, and I do not know what a line does when it comes off a broken keeping and neither does anybody else living, because it has not happened in England since before the rolls.

"And you wish to braid that into the fourth oldest Accord in this kingdom.

"I have spent my life at this. I have made forty matches in three parishes and I have not made a bad one, and I am telling you as a matter of business and not of pride: nobody knows what would come of it. It might strengthen you. It might take him down with you. It might do nothing at all. You do not know, hedoes not know, that antiquary of his in London does not know, and I would not do it with a horse."

Elizabeth was quiet for a moment, because it was, she recognized, the only argument anybody had made to her all year that she had not already made to herself at two in the morning.

"That is a fair objection," she said, "and it is the first one your ladyship has made that I shall think about after you have gone.

"And it is still not a promise, and I am still not going to give one — because a promise made aloud is a thing that takes, and your ladyship knows that better than anybody in this county, and that is precisely why you have come nine-and-twenty miles to ask for one instead of writing me a letter."

Lady Catherine de Bourgh looked at her for a long moment.

"Who told you that?" she said.

"Nobody who did anything wrong," said Elizabeth Bennet.

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"I take no leave of you, Miss Bennet. I send no compliments to your mother. You deserve no such attention. I am most seriously displeased."

She walked back up through the paddock at a considerable pace and did not look at the house.