Page 38 of Hard Home

That is the only word she ever found for it. The floor did not move and the music did not falter and the candles burned straight up. But the ballroom at Netherfield, with a hundred people in it and a fiddler and a boy with a cello,leaned in, the way a crowd leans when something is happening at the far end of the street; and the leaning was toward her, and toward the heavy man in black holding her right hand in his; and every window and door of that new deep ward turned over like an eye and looked at the two of them.

Somebody's hand — Mrs. Long's — brushed her sleeve and Mrs. Long said, "Beg pardon, my dear," in a voice from a long way off.

Mr. Collins said, "—and I flatter myself that her Ladyship would not disapprove, particularly upon an occasion which, as I have had the honor of observing to my cousin Mary, may be considered as—"

Elizabeth could not remember the figure.

She had danced it since she was twelve. It went out of her head entirely, the way a name goes, and she stood in the middle of the set with her hand in her cousin's hand and the whole room bending slowly toward her like water going round a stone, and she thought, with great clarity:I do not know what is happening and it is happening to me.

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Two things happened then.

The first was that Miss Mary Bennet came round the outside of the set.

She had been in the little card-room since the dancing began, with a candle and a book she had brought from home in the pocket of her gown, because she had not been able to find the word at Longbourn and had thought it might be in the appendix; and she had found it at nine minutes past ten, on page four hundred and eleven, in a note printed smaller than the rest.

She had then had to get from the card-room to her sister through the crush at the top of the set, past Mrs. Long, past the Gouldings, past her own mother, in a room where nobody had ever once in her life got out of Mary Bennet's way.

She was eleven feet short when it stopped.

The second was that Mr. Darcy, who had been standing at the west end of the room with his back to the window bay for an hour and a quarter, not dancing, not speaking, and being disliked by everybody in the county for it, turned round and put his right hand flat against the frame of the bay window, and took back four days' work in about nine seconds.

Elizabeth felt it go.

The whole vast attention of the room lifted off her, all at once, like a hand off the back of the neck; and the fiddler was playing, and the figure was the ordinary figure she had known since she was twelve, and Mr. Collins was saying "—as I was observing, anoccasion of a very superior kind," and Mrs. Long was going past with a glass of negus.

She finished the dance. She had no idea how.

When she came off the floor Charlotte took her arm and said, "Lizzy, you are white as the tablecloth," and Elizabeth said that the room was very hot, which was true, and that Mr. Collins had trodden on her foot, which was also true, and that she had never in her life been so glad of anything as the end of a dance, which was the truest thing she said all evening.

At the west end of the room, Mr. Darcy was standing with his back against the window bay and his hand out of sight behind him, flat on the wood, and he did not move away from that window for the next four hours.

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Mary came up at last.

"Lizzy."

"Mary, my dear, not now. I am going to sit down."

"It was 'the acknowledgment,'" said Mary. "That is the name of it. Colwood does not use it, because he thinks it superstitious, but Harrow's appendix has it, and there is a case in it from Northamptonshire in 1704 where a room did it to two people who—"

"Mary."

Mary stopped.

Elizabeth looked at her sister — at the flat, plain, unregarded face, and the book still gripped in both hands with a finger in it at page four hundred and eleven, and the two spots of color high on her cheeks from getting through a crowd that had not once given way to her — and something turned over inside her.

"Did anything happen to me just now?" she said quietly.

"Yes," said Mary.

"Do you know what?"

"No. Something began and then it stopped." Mary's finger moved in the book. "It should not have stopped, Lizzy. That is the part I do not understand. It cannot be interrupted from inside a room. There is nothing in any of the books about a thing like that stopping."

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