Page 8 of Hard Home

"Mr. Darcy?"

"Mr. Darcy."

"I did not speak to him."

"Nobody spoke to him. That is rather the point."

Jane turned round on the stool. "Lizzy — you will laugh, and I would rather you did not, only for a minute. When he came in, and stopped at the door — everything went quieter. Not the noise. Underneath the noise. I have spent my whole life making rooms quieter and I know precisely how much it takes out of a person, and I felt it happen and it was not me." She frowned. "And then it went on being quieter, all evening, in the corner where he stood. He was not being disagreeable in the corner. He was beingcarefulin it."

"He said I was tolerable."

"Yes," said Jane, "and that was unpardonable, and I do not defend it, and I would not have him in the house." She began to plait her hair. "I only say that a man who does not wish to be looked at will often say a thing designed to make people look away, and that it generally works."

Elizabeth laughed at her, and kissed her, and blew out the candle, and lay a long while in the dark composing three separate replies, each better than the last, and did not sleep well.

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Mr. Bingley had inherited property to the amount of nearly a hundred thousand pounds from his father, who had intended to purchase an estate but did not live to do it. Mr. Bingley intended it likewise, and sometimes made choice of his county; but as he was now provided with a good house and the liberty of a manor, it was doubtful to many of those who best knew the easiness ofhis temper, whether he might not spend the remainder of his days at Netherfield, and leave the next generation to purchase.

The Bingley Accord was one-and-thirty years old.

That is a difficult thing to be, in England. A new Accord is not a small one — Bingley's answered him readily, warmly, without reserve, in the manner of a young dog — but it has noweight, and weight is what the great houses trade in. A man with a young line entering a room of old ones feels it the way a man with a new title feels his own name in another man's mouth. He is not despised. He is simply, everywhere, junior.

Which was some part of the reason that Mr. Bingley, who was in all things his own master, had never in four years disregarded the opinion of Mr. Darcy.

He did not think of it as deference. He thought of it as trust, and it was that too; and Darcy was cleverer than he was and knew it and did not much conceal it; and on the strength of an understanding of the very first class Bingley had come to rely upon Darcy's judgment as upon something structural, like a beam.

Between him and Darcy there was a very steady friendship, in spite of a great opposition of character. Bingley was endeared to Darcy by the easiness, openness, and ductility of his temper, though no disposition could offer a greater contrast to his own. Darcy was continually giving offense.

The manner in which they spoke of the Meryton assembly was sufficiently characteristic. Bingley had never met with pleasanter people or prettier girls in his life; every body had been most kind and attentive to him; there had been no formality, no stiffness; he had soon felt acquainted with all the room; and as to Miss Bennet, he could not conceive an angel more beautiful. Darcy, on the contrary, had seen a collection of people in whom there was little beauty and no fashion, for none of whom he had felt the smallest interest, and from none receivedeither attention or pleasure. Miss Bennet he acknowledged to be pretty, but she smiled too much.

Mrs. Hurst and her sister allowed it to be so — but still they admired her and liked her, and pronounced her to be a sweet girl, and one whom they should not object to know more of. Miss Bennet was therefore established as a sweet girl, and their brother felt authorized by such commendation to think of her as he chose.

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Later, when Bingley had gone up and Mr. Hurst was asleep with his legs out, Miss Bingley did the accounts.

"The eldest is very sweet," she said. "Let us be quite fair to her. And the Longbourn Accord — Louisa, do you recall what Mrs. Long said of it?"

"Entailed," said Mrs. Hurst comfortably. "Heirs male."

"Heirs male, and five daughters, and the gentleman is one-and-fifty." Miss Bingley turned her bracelet round her wrist. "So. Not a line at all, in five years or fifteen. A candle in a window with the wax nearly out. Andbeforethat — the mother is a Gardiner. Which is to say, an attorney's daughter of Meryton, whose brother lives in Cheapside within view of his own warehouses. There is no old blood in that house from any direction. There is a small county Accord that will sever, and there are five girls who will not have so much as a parlor trick between them by the time they are thirty."

"They dress very ill," said Mrs. Hurst.

"They dress as people dress who have three generations behind them and know it. Really, it is not their fault, and I do not blame them in the least, and I hope I am not the sort of woman who—" She stopped, and began again, in a different voice. "Mr. Darcy. You said nothing all evening. Say something now, and settle it, for Charles will be at Longbourn by Thursday and I would rather he went knowing."

Mr. Darcy was standing at the window with his back to the room, which was where he had spent most of the evening at the assembly also.

"There is no old blood in the house," he said. "You are correct."

"There! You see, Louisa."

"Their connections are, as you say, in trade and in the law." He did not turn round. "As, at two generations' distance, are your own; and as, at a rather shorter distance, are Bingley's; and it is a curious thing, Miss Bingley, how much more offensive a warehouse becomes when it is somebody else's."

There was a silence of a quality not often achieved at Netherfield.

"I am sure," said Miss Bingley at last, with a laugh that came out at the wrong pitch, "that I did not mean—"