Page 127 of Hard Home

"He is going out like a candle, and I am going out beside him, and I am three-and-twenty and it is very much slower, and I have been holding a door shut since I was four years old without knowing there was a door."

Elizabeth could not speak.

"So there it is," said Jane. "And a man has asked me to marry him because for the first time in my life he could see my face, and my face is only visible because I am running down. I have thought about that a great deal in three days and I am not going to think about it any more, because it does not alter one single thing.

"I would rather have it this way. I would rather be seen once, worn out, in my mother's shrubbery, than go on being lovely and invisible until I was fifty."

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Mary said nothing about the engagement for two days.

On the third evening she came into Elizabeth's room, and sat down on the wooden chair, and said, without any preliminary at all:

"When she marries she will go to Netherfield."

"Yes. Three miles."

"Three miles is not on this ground," said Mary.

Elizabeth put down her brush.

"I have thought about it since Tuesday and I have not said anything," said Mary, "because there is nothing whatever to be done about it and because Jane is happier than I have ever seen anybody in my life and I am not going to be the person who spoils it. I am telling you and then I shall stop.

"The condition isa man of my blood upon this ground. There have been five of us on it since Lydia was born. There were four after August. When Jane goes to Netherfield there will be three, and if you go anywhere there will be two, and I have no expectation of going anywhere so there will always be at least one.

"But we are not the condition. My father is the condition, because he is the man, and the rest of us are — I do not know what we are. Ballast, perhaps. Something that made it slower."

She looked at her hands.

"That is what I cannot get out of my head, Lizzy. It began to go in the OctoberafterLydia came out and began spending herself at every assembly in the county, and it went nine yards a week all winter while we were all of us out dancing, and it stopped on the second of May and I do not know why, and it moved forty-two yards on the night the youngest of us was taken off it altogether.

"I do not say I have it right. I have got it wrong twice before. I only say that this family has spent four hundred years being kepton a piece of ground by a document nobody could read, and that we are all of us now going away off it in different directions, very sensibly, one at a time."

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Lady Catherine de Bourgh came on the Thursday morning at eleven o'clock.

Elizabeth was in the small parlor with Kitty. She heard the carriage first and did not attend to it, because carriages came now — Bingley's, and the Lucases', and the apothecary's; and it was Kitty who got to the window.

"Lizzy, it is a chaise and four, and I do not know the livery, and there is a lady in it who has not got out."

Elizabeth came to the window.

The carriage had drawn up in the sweep, and the servant had let down the steps and was standing at the door; and the door was open, and nobody had come out of it.

It stood like that for the better part of a minute.

Then Lady Catherine de Bourgh got down onto the gravel of Longbourn and stood there in the September sun and looked at the front of the house — not at the door, but along it, up at the roof-line and down again to the ground, in the manner of a woman valuing a property she has no intention of buying.

Then she looked past it, north-east, over the shrubbery and the paddock, in the direction of the church.

She stood so for perhaps four seconds.

"Whoisit?" said Kitty.

"That," said Elizabeth, "is Lady Catherine de Bourgh."

Her voice came out perfectly level and she was rather surprised by it. She was aware of her own heart going, and of Kitty saying something, and of Hill in the passage, and of the extreme clarity with which she could see the sleeve of her own gown against the window frame.