Page 72 of Hard Home

I am very well and very happy and I am practicing.

At Dartford he stopped thinking about the letters and thought instead, quite clearly and at length, about a boy of ninebeing walked out to the western boundary at Pemberley by a man in a green coat, three times in one summer, and coming back the third time crying; and about what his father had said at dinner that night, which was:the ground is a fool and I shall not be governed by it.

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The lodging-house was in a terrace with a view of the sea. The stairs were narrow and had a smell of salt and cooking.

Georgiana was standing at the window in the first-floor sitting room when he came in, and she turned round.

Elizabeth had never in her life felt anything like what went through the man in that doorway, and she had no name for it, and the nearest she could get afterwards was that it was the feeling of coming into a room and finding that the furniture has been taken out.

She was fifteen. She was thin, and very tall for her age, and she had been crying and had stopped, and she said, "You came," in a voice of such flat astonishment that it was worse than anything else in the whole quarter of an hour.

He said, "Of course I came."

And then there was a great deal of it that Elizabeth could not afterwards put in order — Georgiana's hands, and being sat down, and the whole of it coming out in about nine minutes in the wrong order, andhe was kind to methree separate times, andnobody has ever wanted to talk to me for a whole afternoon, andI know I am stupidtwice, and Darcy on one knee by a chair in a hired room saying nothing at all, because he had discovered within about forty seconds that anything he said would be heard as anger, and had therefore stopped.

And under it, running the entire time, the thing he could not attend to and could not stop noticing: that his sister's hands were cold, and that the room was ordinary, and that when shehad turned round from the window there had beennothing coming off her at all.

He had known before she finished. He had known standing in the doorway. It had simply not been available to him as a thought until she had done talking.

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Mr. Wickham came in at about two.

He came in without knocking, which Elizabeth understood at once was habit and not insolence, and he had his hat in his hand, and he stopped in the doorway when he saw who was there.

Nobody shouted. That was the part Elizabeth could not get over, then or afterwards.

Darcy stood up. Wickham looked at him for a moment, and then at Georgiana, and then at the floor, and said, "Ah."

He was not in the least frightened. Elizabeth, riding inside a man whose whole body had gone as tight as a drumhead, could see that quite plainly and could feel her own — his own — recognition of it:he has done this before, and he has been interrupted before, and he knows exactly how long it takes.

"Georgiana," said Darcy, "go into the other room."

"Fitzwilliam—"

"Go into the other room, dearest."

She went. Wickham watched her go, with an expression of such tender concern that Elizabeth, who had sat beside that expression at a card table in Meryton for two hours with her gloves off, felt something go over her that had nothing to do with the memory at all.

Then the door shut and the expression came off him like a hat.

"You have not brought anybody," he said.

"No."

"No. You would not." Wickham put his hat on the table and looked round the room in a mildly appraising way. "Well. Thereis nothing to be got by staying, then. I shall want something for the lodgings, which are paid to Michaelmas, and I shall be gone by four; and you may tell yourself whatever you find comfortable, but you might consider being civil to me for ten minutes, because I have not done one thing in six weeks that a magistrate in England would take an interest in."

"Get out of this house."

"Presently." He was not moving. "She is very fond of me. You know that, do you not? That is not a thing I did. She was fifteen and by herself in a lodging-house in a wet August with a paid woman for company and a brother who writes to her on Tuesdays, and I sat and listened to her talk about her mother for six weeks, and I never once told her that she was too young to be interesting.

"You may hang me for the rest. I shall not argue with you about the rest. But you might have a care what you tell yourself aboutthatpart, Darcy, because I have thought about it a good deal, and I do not believe you can get from the beginning of it to the end without arriving at yourself."

Darcy said nothing.

"How much has she lost?" said Wickham, with what sounded, to Elizabeth, appallingly like professional interest.