Page 129 of Hard Home

"At once to insist upon having such a report universally contradicted."

"Your coming to Longbourn, to see me and my family," said Elizabeth coolly, "will be rather a confirmation of it; if, indeed, such a report is in existence."

"If!Do you then pretend to be ignorant of it? Has it not been industriously circulated by yourselves? Do you not know that such a report is spread abroad?"

"I never heard that it was."

"And can you likewise declare, that there is nofoundationfor it?"

"I do not pretend to possess equal frankness with your ladyship. You may ask questions, which I shall not choose to answer."

"This is not to be borne. Miss Bennet, I insist on being satisfied. Has he, has my nephew, made you an offer of marriage?"

"Your ladyship has declared it to be impossible."

"It ought to be so; it must be so, while he retains the use of his reason. Butyourarts and allurements may, in a moment of infatuation, have made him forget what he owes to himself and to all his family. You may have drawn him in."

"If I have, I shall be the last person to confess it."

"Miss Bennet, do you know who I am? I have not been accustomed to such language as this. I am almost the nearestrelation he has in the world, and am entitled to know all his dearest concerns."

"But you are not entitled to know mine; nor will such behavior as this ever induce me to be explicit."

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Lady Catherine walked four paces and turned round.

"Very well," she said. "You are quick, and you are impertinent, and you are not stupid, and I am too old to spend a morning on it. We shall have the truth, then, since you will not be brought at it sideways.

"He has offered for you and you refused him."

Elizabeth said nothing.

"In April, in Kent, at the parsonage, on the evening you had a head-ache and did not come to me." Lady Catherine's face was perfectly composed. "He went out at eight and came in at nine and did not speak at dinner the next day and left the county in the morning eleven days before he intended. I have had four-and-thirty years of that boy and I have buried two of my own; do you imagine I could not read it?

"And he has been at Netherfield a fortnight, and he has taken the lease himself, and he does not shoot."

"Then your ladyship knows a great deal more than she came to find out."

"I came to find out whether you had said yes to him the second time. You have not, or there would be a letter." Lady Catherine sat down on the wooden seat under the hornbeams, which nobody ever sat on because it was damp, and arranged her hands on the head of her stick. "Sit down. No — stand, if you would rather; you will be more comfortable disliking me on your feet.

"Now. You believe that I have come to tell you that you are the daughter of a country gentleman of two thousand a year, with an uncle in Cheapside and an attorney in Meryton and asister lately married in a great hurry, and that the shades of Pemberley are to be thus polluted."

"I did rather expect something of the kind."

"So did I, when I set out," said Lady Catherine de Bourgh. "I had it composed as far as Hatfield. It is a very good speech and I have made it twice before in my life, to better-connected girls than you, and it worked both times.

"And then I came into this county."

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She sat quite still under the hornbeams.

"Two miles past Hatfield," she said, "I put my hand on the window frame of my own carriage and the ground went out from under me. Not the road; theground. Like coming off a made floor onto a bog in the dark.

"It is nine-and-twenty miles from the boundary of this county to your father's gate, and I have felt it under me the whole way, and it got worse for the last eleven, and I sat in a stopped carriage in your sweep for one full minute this morning because I was not certain that I could stand up in it.

"How long has it been like this?"