I cringed.
“Sorry, I’m being too hard on your mother, I think.” He upended his tea cup into his mouth, draining it. He yawned. “Are we brewing more tea?”
“Yes, we are,” I said.
“Good,” he said and stifled another yawn.
I yawned too. Yawns were like that. If someone else yawned, you also yawned. I checked the tea, but I could not say if it was ready or not. “Do you have your pocket watch with you?” I remembered that he had one. When he proposed to me, he had been toying with it nervously, actually, opening and shutting it but not really looking at it as he went on and on about the vast cavern of distance between our stations in society.
“Yes, why?”
“Because you can tell me when five minutes have passed and then the tea should be done,” I said.
“Actually, I don’t know where it is,” he said, coming out of his cocoon of blankets to look in all of his pockets. “I don’t even remember the last time I looked at it.”
“Oh, well,” I said.
“That’s odd, though,” he said. “That’s very odd. I’m trying to remember if I had this morning. You see, usually, my valet gives it to me. And actually, this watch, it isn’t even my watch. I found it in a drawer in my bedchamber.”
“So, you simply stole it?” I said.
“No, it was more that I was just…” He was quiet. “The watch is a bit odd, in fact. I had this urge, when I saw it, to take it, you know?”
“No, I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never had an urge to take a watch.”
“I’m a bit disturbed that it’s missing,” he said.
“I think the tea is done,” I said, because I did not see why we were making such a fuss over this watch.
“Yes, all right,” he said.
I poured it out for both of us.
We drank, gazing at each other over the fire.
“So, I think the way I’m meant to understand it, sir,” I said finally, “is that you like me, and you even find me pretty, but you think I’d be an intolerable sort of wife. So, you like me, but not like that.”
He cleared his throat. “No wonder you don’t like me, Miss Bennet.”
“Mmm?” I was confused.
“I shouldn’t say things the way I say them,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said you’d make an intolerable wife. You’d… I’m sure there would be a number of very pleasant things about being married to you.”
I clutched my tea tightly. “You are exceedingly confusing, sir.”
“If there were only you and me in the world, Miss Bennet, of course I should marry you,” he said. “That is, if you actually liked me.” He laughed. “It’s only about them, you see, about what everyone thinks. If none of that mattered…”
I sipped my tea. It was very quiet, because I was thinking that it was basically like that now. No one could judge us, because it was just him and me, living this day over and over again.
“Well,” he said, “how can I make you like me?”
I felt flustered. I sipped at my tea. “But it isthat, sir. That is the reason why I don’t like you.”
“What is?”
“The fact you are so concerned with what everyone thinks about you. About propriety. About living up to expectations. And about treating everyone below you as if they don’t even matter.”
“Now, wait a moment,” he said. “The last thing you just said is not fair.”
