Page 86 of Hard Home

Her father was quiet for a moment.

"No," he said. "I do not know that I do. But it is what I am going to say, and I shall go on saying it, and by the middle of June I dare say I shall believe it very comfortably."

He turned the box round on the table with one finger.

"I have had one thing in my life that I could not do anything about," said Mr. Bennet, "and I have had it since I was thirty-one, and I have made a way of living out of it, and the way is this: I find out exactly how bad a thing is, and I look at it very steadily, and then I make a joke and go into another room. It has answered for twenty years. It answered in November, when your mother was right about your cousin and I let you refuse him. It is answering now.

"You have brought me a thing I can do nothing about, and I have done what I do."

"Youcando something. You can say no to her."

"Yes," said her father. "I can. And I am not going to, and in about ten weeks one of us is going to be very sorry about that, and I am fairly certain which."

He opened the library door for her.

"Go to bed, Lizzy," he said. "And tell your sister Mary that she is to bring me those books in the morning. Not the notes — the books. I should like to read them myself, and I have not read anything in nine years that was not written to amuse me."

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The first week of their return was soon gone. The second began. It was the last of the regiment's stay in Meryton, and all the young ladies in the neighborhood were drooping apace. The dejection was almost universal. The elder Miss Bennets alone were still able to eat, drink, and sleep, and pursue the usual course of their employments. Very frequently were they reproached for this insensibility by Kitty and Lydia, whose own misery was extreme, and who could not comprehend such hard-heartedness in any of the family.

"Good Heaven! what is to become of us! What are we to do!" would they often exclaim in the bitterness of woe. "How can you be smiling so, Lizzy?"

Their affectionate mother shared all their grief; she remembered what she had herself endured on a similar occasion five and twenty years ago.

And then, four days before the regiment marched, the invitation came.

Mrs. Forster wrote it herself, in a large loose hand with three words underlined, and it was brought up to Lydia at breakfast, and the noise in the small parlor at Longbourn was such that Hill came in to see whether somebody had fallen down the stairs.

Elizabeth watched her father read it.

He read it twice, which he did not do with letters. Then he folded it and gave it back across the table and said, "Well, my dear, you had better take a great many pins," and Lydia screamed and kissed him, and Mrs. Bennet said four things at once, and Kitty burst into tears and went out of the room, and nobody followed her but Mary.

Mr. Bennet did not look at Elizabeth at any point in the four minutes it took, and did not look at her afterwards, and went into the library at nine o'clock and did not come out until dinner.

---

She got to Captain Harding on the Thursday.

It was not difficult, which surprised her; she had constructed three separate stratagems on the way into Meryton and used none of them. Colonel Forster's lodgings were in the market place, and there was a great deal of coming and going with boxes, and she asked a servant for Mrs. Forster and was shown up to a parlor on the first floor where Mrs. Forster was not, and where a man of about forty in a plain coat was standing at a table with a portable desk open in front of him, tying a bundle of papers with tape.

He looked up.

"Miss Bennet."

"You know me, sir?"

"You are the second one. The one who walks." He finished the knot. "Mrs. Forster is at the milliner's and will be an hour. If it is about your sister's things, the wagon goes on Monday and there is room for a box and not for two."

"It is not about my sister's things."

"No," said Captain Harding. "I did not suppose it was."

He did not ask her to sit down, and she did not sit down, and there was a moment in which Elizabeth discovered that every arrangement of the question she had made in the lane sounded, in that room, like a girl being fanciful.

So she said the plainest thing she had.

"Captain Harding, what are your orders?"