Darcy wanted to ask for that invitation. She was not precisely pretty, but she was different in a way he suddenly dearly wished to know better.
Instead, Darcy sharply told Bingley, once more, that he would not dance, and Bingley left at last.
Relieved by his escape, Darcy felt much of the tension that he had felt during the evening dissipate. His shoulders relaxed. He resisted the urge to look at the girl again, to see how she had taken his refusal to be introduced to her.
Suddenly the other girl, the ordinary one whose presence Darcy had nearly forgotten about, ran up to him. She had a pretty face, a little too rouged, and elaborately arranged curls. She had a miserable expression. She was crying.
She looked at him, mouth open, seemingly unable to find her words. In a low mutter she said, “Oh, I am not ugly!”
And then she swirled around and ran out the nearest balcony doors.
The other girl rose, and she flashed Darcy what seemed like a look of amused apology. Her smile seemed amused, and it relaxed her face, and made her clearly pretty. Then she followed the younger Miss out to the balcony.
He sighed.
Darcy had not meant to send a girl to the balcony sobbing. He had only wished to avoid dancing with a stranger. And to the extent that he had thought of the beauty of either of the girls, it was the other one.
The one who by convention he knew would not be considered pretty at all, but who had something in her eyes...
Darcy’s sense of mild shame at his own behavior mixed with harsh judgement of the girl’s outburst, which was far less socially permissible than what he had said. Why hadn’t he said something more polite?
He could have said this instead: “Though they are handsome enough, I will not be tempted to dance.” Darcy realized though that hehadbeen tempted to dance. With the other girl, not the one he’d brought to tears. And that hadunsettled him. The strain of the evening had left his temper under poor regulation.
More than the usual portion of the crowd was looking at him, staring, and probably thinking about him.
It was a thing that he hated, this sense of being observed, especially when he made a mistake. When he did his duties, when he was somewhere he belonged, and when he followed all of the rules of polite society, it was easier for him to bear.
At present feeling himself watched by everyone in the room was painful.
He did not wish to follow that weepy Miss to the balcony to apologize.
Heoughtto.
His mother would have expected him to, even though the more Darcy thought about it, the less he thought that he had done any actual wrong. However, his mother always insisted, “If you stepped on someone’s foot and they are hurt, you ought to make at least a polite inquiry after the heath of their toes, even if the stepping was wholly accidental.”
It would be so much easier to walk over to apologize if he was not being watched.
Fitzwilliam Darcy was not in fact a man who was in the habit of apologizing for anything.
Darcy stood taller and glowered at the balcony door.
He was above this crowd, and they all knew it. He did not need to condescend.
But, as it often did, it was now one of his father’s favorite sayings that echoed through his mind: “There is one thing, which a man can always do, if he chuses, and that is, his duty.”
With internal grumbling, and an external imposing mask, Darcy walked over to the balcony door, feeling the weight of the eyes of everyone—that is everyone who was not dancing, not engrossed in their own conversations, and not abstracted likehe had been. Five persons. Far more than enough to make him exceedingly uncomfortable.
When Darcy stepped up to the doorway to the balcony, he heard a sweet voice echoing through the open crack, “Mr. Darcy is certainly a more interesting person than Mr. Bingley.”
With that sentiment echoing, Darcy stepped out.
The two girls stared at him.
The younger girl had quite wide eyes, while the older one looked at him with a deeply amused glance, as though she could read through him.
Darcy made a bow. “I wish to apologize to you both. I had a strong disinclination to dance tonight, but the way I expressed my disinterest to my friend was unkind to you both. Miss, uh——”
The older woman, the interesting one, said, “Miss Lydia Bennet,” gesturing at her companion. “I am Miss Elizabeth Bennet.”
