Page 45 of Hard Home

Elizabeth said, "Charlotte, I do not know what happened. I am not being close with you. I have asked Mary, and Mary has told me a great deal, and the sum of it is that something began and something stopped it, and neither of us can tell you what the second was."

"No," said Charlotte thoughtfully. "I dare say not."

She was quiet for a moment, and then said something that Elizabeth did not attend to for another eleven days.

"He is a great fool, your cousin, and he is not a wicked man, and he does exactly what he is told by a woman I have never met." Charlotte pulled on her glove. "Those three things together are worse than a villain, Lizzy. A villain may be dealt with. A manwho does what he is told cannot even be argued with, because you would have to argue with somebody who is not in the room."

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Mr. Collins was cold and formal to Elizabeth for the rest of his stay, and made a point of addressing all his conversation to Mrs. Bennet, who received it with an anxiety that Elizabeth was ashamed to see.

He walked out a good deal.

And on each of those days, quite by accident, he met Miss Lucas — in the lane, at the stile by the church, in the road below Lucas Lodge — and Miss Lucas, whose kindness to him was a very seasonable relief after the mortifications he had endured at Longbourn, listened to him.

She listened for an hour on the Wednesday, and an hour and a half on the Thursday, and on the Friday she asked him three questions about Rosings and one about the parsonage, and let him talk from the church gate to her own door.

"You are very good," said Mr. Collins, "to interest yourself in the concerns of a man who is nothing to you."

"I am not particularly good," said Charlotte Lucas. "I am seven-and-twenty."

Mr. Collins, who had not the smallest idea what she meant by it, bowed, and said that her Ladyship was very fond of young women who spoke their minds.

Chapter Twenty-One

The discussion of Mr. Collins's offer was now nearly at an end, and Elizabeth had only to suffer from the uncomfortable feelings necessarily attending it, and occasionally from some peevish allusion of her mother. As for the gentleman himself,hisfeelings were chiefly expressed, not by embarrassment or dejection, or by trying to avoid her, but by stiffness of mannerand resentful silence. He scarcely ever spoke to her, and the assiduous attentions which he had been so sensible of himself, were transferred for the rest of the day to Miss Lucas, whose civility in listening to him, was a seasonable relief to them all, and especially to her friend.

The morrow produced no abatement of Mrs. Bennet's ill humor or ill health. Mr. Collins was also in the same state of angry pride. Elizabeth had hoped that his resentment might shorten his visit, but his plan did not appear in the least affected by it. He was always to have gone on Saturday, and to Saturday he still meant to stay.

After breakfast, the girls walked to Meryton to inquire if Mr. Wickham were returned, and to lament over his absence from the Netherfield ball. He joined them on their entering the town, and attended them to their aunt's, where his regret and vexation and the concern of every body was well talked over. To Elizabeth, however, he voluntarily acknowledged that the necessity of his absencehadbeen self-imposed.

"I found," said he, "as the time drew near, that I had better not meet Mr. Darcy; — that to be in the same room, the same party with him for so many hours together, might be more than I could bear, and that scenes might arise unpleasant to more than myself."

She highly approved his forbearance, and they had leisure for a full discussion of it, and for all the commendation which they civilly bestowed on each other, as Wickham and another officer walked back with them to Longbourn, and during the walk he particularly attended to her.

His accompanying them was a double advantage: she felt all the compliment it offered to herself, and it was most acceptable as an occasion of introducing him to her father and mother.

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Kitty walked at the back with the other officer, and said very little, and was told twice by Lydia to hold up her head.

At the second stile she stopped, and put her hand on the post, and said, "I shall come along in a moment."

"You shall come along now," said Lydia, "or we shall be all day."

"Lydia," said Elizabeth, "let her alone."

She went back and gave her sister her arm, and found that Kitty was cold through her sleeve and breathing rather quickly, and that she weighed nothing at all.

"Kitty. When did you last feel entirely well?"

Kitty thought about it, with the slow effort of a girl of seventeen who has never once been asked a question that required her to consult herself.

"Before Michaelmas," she said. "I think. It is only that I am always tired, Lizzy, and everybody says it is because I am a great baby, and perhaps it is."

"Nobody is going to say it to-day."

"Lydia will."