"Not handsome enough to tempt me," she said aloud.
"What?" Jane looked at her.
"Nothing. Something I overheard at the assembly."
Jane waited. Jane always waited. It was one of the best and most infuriating things about her.
"Mr. Darcy said it. To Mr. Bingley. When Bingley suggested he dance with me." Elizabeth kept her eyes on the lane. "He said I was tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt him."
"Oh, Lizzy."
"It is not a wound. It is merely an observation by a man whose opinion means nothing to me."
Jane's silence said everything her words would not.
"I am not injured by it," Elizabeth insisted. "I found it amusing. A man who stands at the side of a ballroom like a statue in a museum, judging everyone in the room, and the one creature who sees any good in him is a pig. There is a justice in that."
"Perhaps he did not mean it as it sounded."
"He meant it precisely as it sounded. He is proud and cold and disagreeable, and the only thing that baffles me is why Truffles will not believe it."
They reached Longbourn. Elizabeth unlatched the gate and Truffles trotted through, making straight for the garden and the turned earth of Mrs. Bennet's much-abused flower beds. Elizabeth did not stop her. The roses had suffered enough already. One more pig-shaped indignity would make no difference.
Inside, the house was in its usual state of controlled chaos. Kitty was coughing by the fire. Lydia was writing a letter to someone, which was alarming, as Lydia's letters tended to contain information that would be better left unwritten. Mary was at the pianoforte, producing sounds that were technically music in the same way that a recipe was technically food.
Mrs. Bennet was in the sitting room, being comforted by Mrs. Phillips, who had evidently rushed straight from Meryton to deliver the gossip in person.
"That pig," Mrs. Bennet said, the moment Elizabeth appeared. "That pig has ruined us. The whole of Meryton is laughing. I cannot show my face. Your aunt says even Mrs. King was speaking of it, and Mrs. King never speaks of anything."
"The neighbourhood will find something else to discuss soon enough, Mamma."
"They will not! They are calling her the Darcy Pig. The Darcy Pig, Lizzy! As if Mr. Darcy were a breed of swine!"
Elizabeth pressed her lips together very hard.
"It is not amusing," Mrs. Bennet said, who had noticed.
"I did not say it was."
"You were thinking it. I can see you thinking it. This is your father's influence."
Mr. Bennet, as if summoned by the mention of his name, appeared in the doorway of his library. He had his newspaper in one hand and his spectacles perched on the end of his nose.
"I find it interesting," he said, addressing no one in particular, "that your pig, who has shown excellent taste in all other matters, should fix her affections on a man you find so objectionable. Perhaps one of you has misjudged him."
"The pig has not judged him at all," Elizabeth said. "The pig is a pig. She does not assess character. She sat on his boot because he smells of horse and carried her once. That is the whole of it."
"Is it?"
"Yes."
Mr. Bennet regarded her over his spectacles. He had a way of looking at people that suggested he could see through all the layers they had built up over a lifetime and straight down to the small, uncertain creature underneath. Elizabeth found it extremely irritating.
"As you say," he said, and returned to his library.
Elizabeth went upstairs and stood at her bedroom window. The view was of the garden, where Truffles was rooting happilyin the flower bed, her small pink body half-buried in soil. Beyond the garden, the fields stretched toward Meryton, and beyond Meryton, somewhere in the direction of Oakham Mount, was Netherfield Park.
She wondered if Mr. Darcy was thinking about the assembly. She wondered if he was embarrassed, or angry, or if he had already forgotten it entirely. Men like that forgot easily. They moved through the world shedding the consequences of their words the way a duck shed water.
