Austen Said:

“Would Mr. Darcy then consider the rashness of your original intentions as atoned for by your obstinacy in adhering to it?”

“To yield readily — easily — to the persuasion of a friend is no merit with you.”

“You appear to me, Mr. Darcy, to allow nothing for the influence of friendship and affection. A regard for the requester would often make one readily yield to a request, without waiting for arguments to reason one into it. I am not particularly speaking of such a case as you have supposed about Mr. Bingley. We may as well wait, perhaps, till the circumstance occurs before we discuss the discretion of his behaviour thereupon. But in general and ordinary cases between friend and friend, where one of them is desired by the other to change a resolution of no very great moment, should you think ill of that person for complying with the desire, without waiting to be argued into it?”

“What you ask,”

“is no sacrifice on my side; and Mr. Darcy had much better finish his letter.”

“Oh!”

“I heard you before, but I could not immediately determine what to say in reply. You wanted me, I know, to say ‘Yes,’ that you might have the pleasure of despising my taste; but I always delight in overthrowing those kind of schemes, and cheating a person of their premeditated contempt. I have, therefore, made up my mind to tell you, that I do not want to dance a reel at all — and now despise me if you dare.”

“No, no; stay where you are. You are charmingly grouped, and appear to uncommon advantage. The picturesque would be spoilt by admitting a fourth. Good-bye.”

“Not at all,”

“but depend upon it, he means to be severe on us, and our surest way of disappointing him, will be to ask nothing about it.”

“Nothing so easy, if you have but the inclination,”

“We can all plague and punish one another. Tease him — laugh at him. Intimate as you are, you must know how it is to be done.”

“Mr. Darcy is not to be laughed at!”

“That is an uncommon advantage, and uncommon I hope it will continue, for it would be a great loss to me to have many such acquaintances. I dearly love a laugh.”

“Certainly,”

“there are such people, but I hope I am not one of them. I hope I never ridicule what is wise and good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can. But these, I suppose, are precisely what you are without.”

“Such as vanity and pride.”

“I am perfectly convinced by it that Mr. Darcy has no defect. He owns it himself without disguise.”

“That is a failing indeed!”

“Implacable resentment is a shade in a character. But you have chosen your fault well. I really cannot laugh at it. You are safe from me.”

“And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody.”

the carriage might be sent for them in the course of the day.

“Though it is difficult,”

“to guess in what way he can mean to make us the atonement he thinks our due, the wish is certainly to his credit.”

“He must be an oddity, I think,”

“I cannot make him out. — There is something very pompous in his style. — And what can he mean by apologising for being next in the entail? — We cannot suppose he would help it if he could. — Could he be a sensible man, sir?”

“In point of composition,”

“the letter does not seem defective. The idea of the olive-branch perhaps is not wholly new, yet I think it is well expressed.”

“Do you know, mamma,

that

My aunt told me so herself on Saturday. I shall walk to Meryton to-morrow to hear more about it, and to ask when Mr. Denny comes back from town.”

What could be the meaning of it?

she had neither been seeing him before, nor thinking of him since, with the smallest degree of unreasonable admiration.

the commonest, dullest, most threadbare topic might be rendered interesting by the skill of the speaker.

“About a month,”

“He is a man of very large property in Derbyshire, I understand.”

“As much as I ever wish to be,”

“I have spent four days in the same house with him, and I think him very disagreeable.”

“Upon my word I say no more here than I might say in any house in the neighbourhood, except Netherfield. He is not at all liked in Hertfordshire. Everybody is disgusted with his pride. You will not find him more favourably spoken of by anyone.”

“I should take him, even on my slight acquaintance, to be an ill-tempered man.”

“I do not at all know; but I heard nothing of his going away when I was at Netherfield. I hope your plans in favour of the ——shire will not be affected by his being in the neighbourhood.”

“Indeed!”

“Good heavens!”

“but how could that be? How could his will be disregarded? Why did you not seek legal redress?”

“This is quite shocking! He deserves to be publicly disgraced.”

“But what,”

“can have been his motive? What can have induced him to behave so cruelly?”

“I had not thought Mr. Darcy so bad as this — though I have never liked him. I had not thought so very ill of him. I had supposed him to be despising his fellow-creatures in general, but did not suspect him of descending to such malicious revenge, such injustice, such inhumanity as this.”

“I do remember his boasting one day, at Netherfield, of the implacability of his resentments, of his having an unforgiving temper. His disposition must be dreadful.”

“To treat in such a manner the godson, the friend, the favourite of his father!”