“Are you sorry because you don’t wish me to think badly of you, since I am the only person you really have to talk to?” I said. “Or because you genuinely caused my sister a great deal of pain, and probably Mr. Bingley, too, I warrant.”
“Pain, you say,” he said quietly. “Well, I did not think I would. She did not seem to be overly interested in him, not from the times I observed them together.”
“You don’t even know my sister,” I said, annoyed. “She’s shy.”
“Yes, I suppose,” he said. “But your mother made no secret of the fact that she would have been gratified by Bingley’s money.”
I winced, hunching down into the blankets.
“Look here, I’m not saying that I have any room to talk about embarrassing relations, now that you have met my aunt, of course.”
I lifted my face. “What?”
“Lady Catherine is ridiculousness incarnate, quite obviously,” he said. “Of course, I oughtn’t say such a thing about your mother and expect you not to take offense—”
“No, you may.” I sighed. “My mother is, yes, ridiculous.”
“We all have relations who embarrass us, that is my point,” he said. “So, it is not so much that I held your mother’s behavior against your sister, not exactly.”
“What is it, then?” I said. “She would not have been demonstrative. I tell you, she is a hesitant sort of person.”
“Yes, all right, and perhaps that would account for it.” He drank some tea. “All I meant to do was apologize.”
“But you are not sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I believe you would do it again, sir. I believe you think yourself entirely justified.”
“No,” he said with a sigh.
“What is it, then?” I repeated.
“I have truly said it all,” he said. “I believed that your sister’s motivation was primarily to attach your family to the Bingleys and to raise the station of her relations thusly. I did not believe she cared overmuch for my friend. Now, tell me, Miss Bennet, ifyourfriend was being pursued in such a way, what would you do?”
“But that is not what what was happening,” I said. “It wasn’t…” I sighed. “You thought, then, I’m sure, that I would jump at the chance to marry you, and that’s why you proposed. For amusement.”
“I suppose I did,” he said quietly.
“You thought I would marry you for your money.”
“Connection to me would not only be financially beneficial to you, Miss Bennet, it would raise you considerably in a number of ways. Truly, is money really a concern? It is not as if you are starving.”
I scoffed. “Spoken like someone with ten thousand a year.”
“Oh, God, you have not just—”
“Apologies, apologies,” I said. It was true, that was quite gauche, what I had just said. It was not done, throwing someone’s income in their face in that manner.
“It’s a bit more than that, anyway,” he said with a smirk.
I gasped. “You are horrible!”
“I don’t mean to be, that is the thing,” he said.
“Yes, but this simply proves my point. It is just as I said this morning and every morning to Colonel Fitzwilliam. What could a rich man like yourself or like himself know of actual suffering?”
“Oh, truly, Miss Bennet, how doyousuffer?”
“I suppose,” I admitted, “as of yet, I do not. But I have only about a thousand pounds to keep me after my father dies, and—”
“And you will marry someone,” he said. “Well, if you actually accept a man’s proposal, you will.”
