"Allow me to enumerate my reasons. First, I think it a right thing for every clergyman in easy circumstances to set the example of matrimony in his parish. Second, I am convinced it will add very greatly to my happiness. And third, it is the particular advice of the very noble lady whom I have the honour of calling patroness."
"Mr. Collins —"
"Lady Catherine de Bourgh. You may have heard the name. She is of the most extraordinary condescension and has specifically suggested that I find a wife. She said, 'Mr. Collins, you must marry. Choose properly, choose a gentlewoman, and let her be an active, useful sort of person.' And I thought at once of you, Miss Elizabeth."
He said this as though being described as "an active, useful sort of person" by a woman one had never met was the highest form of romantic praise. Elizabeth wondered, briefly, if Lady Catherine selected wives the way one selected horses: by their gait and their capacity for work.
"Mr. Collins, I am honoured, but —"
"You are thinking of your small fortune. I assure you, I shall never reproach you for it. And the matter of the entail is quite settled. When your father dies, this estate becomes mine, and I wish to assure you that I would never turn your mother and sisters out of doors."
He said this as though it were a gift. As though the fact that he would not evict her family from their home was a kindness rather than basic decency. He was smiling. He was radiatingthe benevolent satisfaction of a man who believed he was being extraordinarily generous and expected a proportional response.
"Mr. Collins, I must decline."
The smile held. It held the way a portrait holds its expression: fixed, painted, unaffected by the events occurring in front of it.
"You are too modest. It is natural for a young lady to refuse the man who she secretly means to accept."
"I do not secretly mean to accept."
"Your feelings do you credit. Allow me to assure you that my situation in life, my connections with the family of de Bourgh, and my relationship to your own family make me a most eligible match."
He stepped closer. Elizabeth stepped back. Her heel caught the edge of the cabbage row. He stepped closer again. He was reaching for her hand. His fingers were pale and slightly damp and she did not want them touching her.
"When I next speak to you on this subject," he said, "I shall hope to receive a more favourable answer."
"Mr. Collins, I am perfectly serious. I am not the sort of woman who —"
Truffles, who had been rooting in the turned earth near the kitchen garden wall, lifted her head. Her ears pricked. She looked at Collins, then at Elizabeth, and something in Elizabeth's posture or her voice or her scent communicated distress with a clarity that required no words.
The pig charged.
She covered the distance between the kitchen garden and Mr. Collins before Elizabeth could draw a breath, and she hit his ankle at full speed with the unerring aim of a creature who knew exactly where she was going. Collins yelped. He stumbled sideways. His foot caught on the edge of the flower bed and hewent backward into the box hedge with a crash that sent leaves flying.
He sat in the hedge, his dignity in ruins, his mouth opening and closing without sound. A box leaf drifted down and settled on his head. Another caught in the collar of his coat. His stockings were splashed with mud from the flower bed, and one shoe had come off and was lying on its side in the turned earth like a small, defeated ship.
Truffles stood between him and Elizabeth with her ears flat and her hooves planted, making a low, rumbling sound that Elizabeth had never heard before. A warning. A line drawn in the dirt.
Elizabeth pressed her lips together very hard. She did not laugh. She did not laugh because laughing at Mr. Collins, who was sitting in a hedge with box leaves in his hair and a pig standing guard over the woman who had refused him, would have been unkind, and Elizabeth was many things but she was not unkind.
She did not laugh. She pressed her lips together so hard they went white, and she did not laugh.
"The pig," Collins said, from inside the hedge. His voice had risen half an octave. "The pig has attacked me."
"She is protective. I apologise. But my answer remains no, Mr. Collins."
"Lady Catherine will be most displeased."
"Lady Catherine was not being proposed to."
She collected Truffles, who was still rumbling, and walked inside. She made it through the kitchen, up the back stairs, along the corridor, and into her bedroom. She closed the door. She sat on the bed. Truffles was warm and solid in her arms, grunting with the satisfaction of a job well done.
The laughter broke free. Silent and helpless, her shoulders shaking, her face buried in the pig's neck. She laughed until herribs ached. She laughed until Truffles squirmed. She laughed until she could breathe again, and then she sat with the pig in her lap and looked at the ceiling and thought:If I am going to refuse every man who proposes to me, I should at least train the pig to wait for a signal.
The aftermath was predictable. Mrs. Bennet had hysterics. She wept into her handkerchief. She raged. She declared that Elizabeth was the most ungrateful, headstrong girl in England, and that the pig was a menace that should have been drowned at birth, and that they would all die in poverty in a ditch because Elizabeth was too proud to accept a perfectly respectable man who would have saved them all from ruin.
"Mr. Collins has connections! He has Lady Catherine's favour! He has a good living and a house with two parlours! And you refuse him because of pride!"
