Page 7 of Hard Home

Elizabeth opened her mouth, and found that she had a very good answer ready, and gave it, and it was extremely amusing, and Charlotte laughed, and the subject was changed, and it wasseven months before Elizabeth thought of that exchange again — in Kent, in a parsonage, at eleven at night, with a letter in her hands and her candle burned down to the stub.

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At the assembly, Mr. Darcy left before the last dances.

He went out through the door where he had come in, and Elizabeth did not see it, because she was turned away with her hand on Charlotte's arm, saying the thing abouttolerablefor the second time and getting a better laugh than the first.

At the threshold he stopped, and put two fingers to the lintel again — briefly, in passing, the way another man would straighten a picture in a house not his own — and the old gray line woke under his hand and drew itself up and ran true along the whole length of the door frame, brighter than the woman who made it had ever managed, and held.

Mrs. Long's youngest saw it. She was nine, and had been sent to look for a shawl, and she told her mother, who told her that she had imagined it.

The ward at the Meryton assembly rooms did not need mending again for two years, which was afterwards attributed to a mild winter.

Chapter Four

When Jane and Elizabeth were alone, the former, who had been cautious in her praise of Mr. Bingley before, expressed to her sister how very much she admired him.

"He is just what a young man ought to be," said she, "sensible, good humored, lively; and I never saw such happy manners! — so much ease, with such perfect good breeding!"

"He is also handsome," replied Elizabeth, "which a young man ought likewise to be, if he possibly can. His character is thereby complete."

"I was very much flattered by his asking me to dance a second time. I did not expect such a compliment."

"Did not you?Idid for you. But that is one great difference between us. Compliments always takeyouby surprise, andmenever. What could be more natural than his asking you again? He could not help seeing that you were about five times as pretty as every other woman in the room. No thanks to his gallantry for that." She put down the brush. "And you have not said the other thing."

"What other thing?"

"That he asked you first whether you would object. Before the second." Elizabeth watched her sister in the glass. "Nobody does that, Jane. Not here. A man asks, and a girl may say no and be talked of for a fortnight, and so she does not say no, and everyone calls it a triumph. He asked you in such a way that no would have cost you nothing."

Jane was quiet a moment.

"Yes," she said. "I noticed that."

"Well then."

"I noticed it, Lizzy, and I have been trying since eleven o'clock not to build a house upon it."

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It was, Elizabeth thought, the most characteristic thing her sister had ever said, and also the saddest, and she did not say so.

Jane's gift had no name in the family. It had never needed one, because nobody in the family had ever admitted it was a gift at all — it was simplyJane, the way the weather was simply the weather. Put Jane in a room and the room grew easier. A colicky child would stop; a bolting horse would slow and stand and let itself be caught; two men three sentences from a quarrel would find, obscurely, that they did not much want to quarrel after all, and would go home and be unable to say what the argument had been about.

At the assembly she had done it for two hours without pausing, because a hundred people in a hot room with their blood up is a thing that wants steadying, and Jane steadied it, and every single person in Meryton went home saying what a very pleasant evening it had been and not one of them said her name.

Elizabeth had once tried to explain this to her mother.

"Well," Mrs. Bennet had said, "and what is the good of it, if nobody knows she is doing it?"

Elizabeth had had no answer then. She had one now, seven years later, and it was:none. There is no good in it at all. That is what makes it worth something.But it was not the sort of thing one said in the breakfast parlor, and so she had never said it anywhere.

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"You are too apt," she said instead, "to like people in general. You never see a fault in anybody. All the world are good and agreeable in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of a human being in my life."

"I would wish not to be hasty in censuring any one; but I always speak what I think."

"I know you do; and it isthatwhich makes the wonder. Withyourgood sense, to be so honestly blind to the follies and nonsense of others!" She hesitated, and then, because she could not help it, "And what did you make of the friend?"