Page 13 of Hard Home

"Your conjecture is totally wrong, I assure you. My mind was more agreeably engaged. I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow."

Miss Bingley immediately fixed her eyes on his face, and desired he would tell her what lady had the credit of inspiring such reflections. Mr. Darcy replied with great intrepidity,

"Miss Elizabeth Bennet."

"Miss Elizabeth Bennet!" repeated Miss Bingley. "I am all astonishment. How long has she been such a favorite? — and pray when am I to wish you joy?"

"That is exactly the question which I expected you to ask. A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment. I knew you would be wishing me joy."

"Nay, if you are so serious about it, I shall consider the matter as absolutely settled. You will have a charming mother-in-law, indeed, and of course she will be always at Pemberley with you."

He listened to her with perfect indifference, while she chose to entertain herself in this manner; and as his composure convinced her that all was safe, her wit flowed long.

It was, Miss Bingley reflected afterwards with great satisfaction, the coolest she had ever seen him. He had not colored, or hesitated, or lowered his voice, or looked once across the room to see whether the girl was within hearing. A man in danger does none of those things.

She was six-and-twenty, and had been studying him for four years, and she was wrong about every part of it — for a man of Pemberley's line who feels nothing has no occasion whatever to be composed, and Mr. Darcy had not stopped being composed since the ninth of October.

Chapter Seven

Mr. Bennet's property consisted almost entirely in an estate of two thousand a year, which, unfortunately for his daughters, was entailed, in default of heirs male, on a distant relation; and their mother's fortune, though ample for her situation in life, could but ill supply the deficiency of his. Her father had been an attorney in Meryton, and had left her four thousand pounds.

Four thousand pounds is a great deal of money and no line at all. It will keep five women in a small house in a cheap county for a considerable time. It will not buy back a single hour of what severs on the morning of the funeral, because there is nothing in England to buy it from: the ground does not sell, and the old courts that might have been argued with went away when Elizabeth's great-grandmother was a girl.

Mrs. Bennet had done the sum many times. She had done it in 1801 when Lydia was born and it became certain there would be no son, and she had done it on the day her husband turned fifty, and she did it most nights between the putting out of the candle and sleep. It always came to the same figure. It is possible that if she had ever once been able to say it aloud to a person who did not laugh, she would have become a different woman; but that had not happened, and now she was fifty-one herself, and it was too late for her to be anything but what the arithmetic had made her.

She had a sister married to a Mr. Philips, who had been a clerk to their father and succeeded him in the business, and a brother settled in London in a respectable line of trade.

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The village of Longbourn was only one mile from Meryton; a most convenient distance for the young ladies, who were usuallytempted thither three or four times a week, to pay their duty to their aunt and to a milliner's shop just over the way.

The attention of the younger girls was particularly directed to the last object; and happy indeed was the day on which Mrs. Bennet learned that a regiment was to be quartered in the neighborhood for the whole winter, and Meryton the head quarters.

Their visits to Mrs. Philips were now productive of the most interesting intelligence. Every day added something to their knowledge of the officers' names and connections. Their lodgings were not long a secret, and at length they began to know the officers themselves. Mr. Philips visited them all, and this opened to his nieces a source of felicity unknown before. They could talk of nothing but officers; and Mr. Bingley's large fortune, the mention of which gave animation to their mother, was worthless in their eyes when opposed to the regimentals of an ensign.

"From all that I can collect by your manner of talking," said Mr. Bennet one morning, "you must be two of the silliest girls in the country. I have suspected it some time, but I am now convinced."

Catherine was disconcerted, and made no answer; but Lydia, with perfect indifference, continued to express her admiration of Captain Carter, and her hope of seeing him in the course of the day, as he was going the next morning to London.

"I am astonished, my dear," said Mrs. Bennet, "that you should be so ready to think your own children silly. If I wished to think slightingly of any body's children, it should not be of my own however."

"If my children are silly I must hope to be always sensible of it."

"Yes — but as it happens, they are all of them very clever."

"This is the only point, I flatter myself, on which we do not agree."

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Nobody in Meryton thought to ask what a regiment was doing there.

It had a colonel and a band and a paymaster and it took lodgings and ran up debts at the milliner's and stood about in the market place looking well, and that is what a regiment is; and if some of its officers were of an age and a manner not quite usual, and if the Colonel's second went out at odd hours with a corporal and no horses and came back at four in the morning with his boots ruined, then Meryton, which had the ball and the officers and the wonderful new interest of it all, did not inquire.

Lieutenant Denny was much admired. He was young, and had a good address, and danced willingly, and Lydia declared within a week that he was one of the pleasantest men she had ever met with.

He touched the lintel of the assembly rooms on the first evening, out of the habit of eleven months, and felt nothing at all.

He stood there rather longer than the man behind him thought necessary. Then he went in and was charming for three hours, and got Miss Lydia Bennet a glass of negus, and laughed at everything she said, which was easy, and thought about the ninth stake at Selsey perhaps four times, which was fewer than the night before.