Page 9 of Elizabeth and Caroline
It settled into her rather badly, she was ashamed to say.
She tried to fight that, however. She tried to tell herself it was not even about that. She even made a few jokes with her father about Mr. Collins’s writing style, saying that it was foolish of him to apologize for being the beneficiary of the entail. “As if he could help it,” she said. “Why, it has nothing to do with him and he cannot be blamed for it. Is he a sensible person, do you think?”
Her father laughed, enjoying her joke. He added to it, conspiratorially, “No, my dear, I think he must be entirely the opposite. There is, if I may say, a mixture of servility and self-importance in his letter. I think he will be a very enjoyable person to observe.”
But not to marry,thought Elizabeth.
She did not say that out loud, however. She was fightingagainst her own sense of self-importance, she supposed.
She went on a walk that afternoon, all alone, and she thought to herself,What were you thinking, anyway? You were never going to do anything with yourself, and you know it. You weren’t going to go anywhere or see anything or make any discoveries or have any adventures.
It was true.
Even her foolish little daydream about a wealthy man showing up and whisking her off to his large estate with all of his servants was one that would only mean that she was picked up and taken elsewhere.
She was going to spend her life the way women spent their lives. Hopefully, she would have her own house to keep and would bear her children and have a comfortable life. There was nothing at all to be ashamed of in the idea of being the mistress of Longbourn.
Besides, she could go off with Mr. Collins now to his rectory near Westerham, Kent and escape her mother and have her own little household to keep.
Perhaps Mr. Collins would be handsome. Perhaps he would be amiable. Perhaps…
Why did she feel as if she had been given a prison sentence?
CHAPTER THREE
MR. COLLINS ARRIVEDthat evening just in time for dinner.
He was not handsome.
He was not amiable.
He was a tall, heavy looking man of five and twenty, with a sort of bluster to him. He seemed to end all of his sentences as if he were addressing an imaginary congregation, lifting his chin and looking off into the distance importantly. “I am very sensible, you see, to the—” Here, he paused and looked over everyone’s head, squaring his shoulders with a flourish. “Hardship of my fair cousins.”
Elizabeth was flushed with a sense of sheer horror.
She could not be married to this man.
She could not do it, not without being ashamed every time she came into a room, fully mortified to be this man’s wife, and she could not bear it.
Her father found the man deliciously ridiculous and took every occasion at dinner to set up Mr. Collins to illustrate this.
“Lady Catherine de Bourgh has been the epitome of what a patron should be, of course,” said Mr. Collins. He addressed the next to the ceiling, speaking with great severity. “She has, through the goodness of her being, seen fit to ask me to dine at Rosings, on two occasions.” He paused here, to allow this to sink in, as if he had deliveredsome bit of ultimate and searing truth, though he was not looking at any of them, but still the ceiling. He continued, gesturing with both hands, “Just recently, in fact, she was so kind as to include me in her party of quadrille players. This was just the Saturday before, you see, and she has been ever so good with her advice to me as well, even deigning to visit my humble parsonage, and to give her thoughts on shelves in the closets.”
Elizabeth could not eat.
Her father was having the time of his life. He got Mr. Collins talking about Lady Catherine’s daughter, and Mr. Collins conveyed that he had slavishly praised Miss Anne de Bourgh, though she was in fact sickly and wan and lacking in the constitution for any taxing behavior.
“Oh, yes,” her father said. “You are quite adept at flattering with delicacy, Mr. Collins.”
Mr. Collins tilted his chin, nodding, as if he did not realize this was an insult.
Her father smiled all the wider. “May I ask, when you do employ your flattery, sir, is it something that just comes to you in the moment? Or do you think of it ahead of time?”
“Well, if I do, of course, I attempt to give it as much of an unstudied air as possible,” said Mr. Collins gravely to the space of the wall above her father’s head.
Mr. Bennet was smirking so much, he had to cover his mouth with a napkin.
Elizabeth felt like she was going to vomit.
