Austen Said:

“I mention it, because it is the living which I ought to have had. A most delightful place! — Excellent Parsonage House! It would have suited me in every respect.”

“How should you have liked making sermons?”

“Exceedingly well. I should have considered it as part of my duty, and the exertion would soon have been nothing. One ought not to repine — but, to be sure, it would have been such a thing for me! The quiet, the retirement of such a life would have answered all my ideas of happiness! But it was not to be. Did you ever hear Darcy mention the circumstance, when you were in Kent?”

“I have heard

from authority, which I thought as good,

that

“You have. Yes, there was something in that; I told you so from the first, you may remember.”

“I did hear,

too,

that

that

and

that

“You did! and it was not wholly without foundation. You may remember what I told you on that point, when first we talked of it.”

“Come, Mr. Wickham, we are brother and sister, you know. Do not let us quarrel about the past. In future, I hope we shall be always of one mind.”

his dear sister Elizabeth,

she had said enough to keep him quiet.

“Oh, lord! I don't know. Not these two or three years, perhaps.”

“As often as I can. But you know married women have never much time for writing. My sisters may write to me. They will have nothing else to do.”

“This is the consequence, you see, Madam, of marrying a daughter,”

“It must make you better satisfied that your other four are single.”

“I saw you look at me to-day, Lizzy, when my aunt told us of the present report; and I know I appeared distressed. But don't imagine it was from any silly cause. I was only confused for the moment, because I felt that I should be looked at. I do assure you that the news does not affect me either with pleasure or pain. I am glad of one thing, that he comes alone; because we shall see the less of him. Not that I am afraid of myself, but I dread other people's remarks.”

capable of coming there with no other view than what was acknowledged;

the greater probability of his coming there with his friend's permission, or being bold enough to come without it.

“Yet it is hard,”

“that this poor man cannot come to a house which he has legally hired, without raising all this speculation! I will leave him to himself.”

In spite of what her sister declared, and really believed to be her feelings in the expectation of his arrival,

her spirits were affected by it.

They were more disturbed, more unequal, than she had often seen them.

“I begin to be sorry that he comes at all,”

“It would be nothing; I could see him with perfect indifference, but I can hardly bear to hear it thus perpetually talked of. My mother means well; but she does not know, no one can know, how much I suffer from what she says. Happy shall I be, when his stay at Netherfield is over!”

“I wish I could say anything to comfort you,”

“but it is wholly out of my power. You must feel it; and the usual satisfaction of preaching patience to a sufferer is denied me, because you have always so much.”

“There is a gentleman with him, mamma,”

“who can it be?”

“La!”

“it looks just like that man that used to be with him before. Mr. what's-his-name. That tall, proud man .”

the awkwardness which must attend her sister, in seeing him almost for the first time after receiving his explanatory letter.

To Jane, he could be only a man whose proposals she had refused, and whose merit she had undervalued; but to her own more extensive information, he was the person to whom the whole family were indebted for the first of benefits, and whom she regarded herself with an interest, if not quite so tender, at least as reasonable and just as what Jane felt for Bingley.

at his coming to Netherfield, to Longbourn, and voluntarily seeking her again,

his affection and wishes must still be unshaken. But she would not be secure.

“Let me first see how he behaves,”

“it will then be early enough for expectation.”

more as he had been used to look in Hertfordshire, than as she had seen him at Pemberley. But, perhaps he could not in her mother's presence be what he was before her uncle and aunt.

It was a painful, but not an improbable, conjecture.

her mother owed to the latter the preservation of her favourite daughter from irremediable infamy,

how Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner did,

He was not seated by her; perhaps that was the reason of his silence; but it had not been so in Derbyshire. There he had talked to her friends, when he could not to herself.

“Could I expect it to be otherwise!”

“Yet why did he come?”