If such happiness were possible—
Might it not be possible for her as well?
Later, as the ball drew toward its close, she found herself once more beside Mr. Darcy.
“You have been thoughtful this evening,” he said.
“I have had reason to be.”
His gaze followed hers to where Jane stood with Bingley, their happiness plain.
“You are pleased for her.”
“I am,” Elizabeth said. “Very much so.”
“And for yourself?”
The question was thoughtful. Elizabeth did not answer at once.
“I think,” she said at last, “that I am no longer content to imagine that such happiness belongs only to others.”
Darcy’s breath stilled.
“That is a considerable change.”
“It is,” she replied.
She turned toward him then, her expression steady.
“I begin to think that I may wish for more than I once allowed.”
Darcy did not look away.
“Then I am very glad of it.”
Elizabeth smiled.
And this time—
There was no hesitation in it.
The weeks that followed the Netherfield ball passed with a steadiness that, to Darcy’s mind, would once have seemed almost uneventful.
He did not think so now.
What another man might have called a peaceful season, he found increasingly full—of expectation, of meaning, of small moments that would formerly have escaped his notice entirely and now seemed to shape the course of his days with disconcerting ease. The weather turned in earnest as November gave way to December. Frost came first in the mornings, silvering the fields and hedgerows, followed by a succession of days so gray and damp that the roads became nearly impassable. Open-air exercise, once a ready excuse for movement and solitude, grew less practicable, and society contracted as winteroften obliged it to do. Calls were shorter. Visits required more determination. The world seemed to gather itself inward.
Darcy did not resent it.
Indeed, he found that the narrowing of outward amusements brought with it a greater clarity in those things that mattered. The society of Longbourn, so lightly dismissed by others and so steadily dearer to him, did not require diversion to sustain it. It had, rather, a warmth of its own, one that seemed to deepen as the season advanced. The drawing rooms were brighter for the darkness without. The conversation seemed more companionable for the weather’s severity. Even the absurdities of domestic life, once things he might have endured with private impatience, became part of an atmosphere that felt less like inconvenience than belonging.
Bingley, for his part, was wholly transformed by engagement.
There had never been much reserve in his disposition, but now what affection he had always scattered freely appeared to have gathered itself into one clear direction. He spoke of Jane with a constancy that would have become tiresome in another man and was only endearing in him. He accepted interruption from Mrs. Bennet, inquiries from Kitty and Lydia, and even the more solemn congratulations of Mr. Collins with a good humor that seemed proof against everything. When, after some discussion of practicalities, it was determined that the wedding should take place in January, he appeared to regard the delay not as a necessary interval but as a personal trial imposed upon him without mercy.
“It is monstrous,” he said one afternoon at Netherfield, flinging himself into a chair with dramatic resignation, “that a man may be engaged and still expected to wait.”
Darcy, who sat opposite with a book open in his hand and no attention fixed upon it, raised a brow. “You have borne greater hardships.”
