Elizabeth reads eagerly, with a throng of conflicting emotions. She commences by being incredulous. “This could not be true,” she says of his assertion that he has thought Jane free from any special partiality for Bingley, while she writhes under the cutting references to her other relations and their exhibition of themselves at the Netherfield ball.
Again she cries out with still more energy, “This must be false,” when she comes to the temperate statement of Wickham’s misconduct and absolute untrustworthiness.
But as she reads, and re-reads, and reflects on the contents of the letter, the girl’s good sense, her own fairness and truthfulness come to her aid against the rooted prejudice which had so blinded her judgment—finding ample food as it did in the besetting sin of Darcy, which reflected itself in his unpopular and unconciliatory manner, in contrast with the superficially pleasant address, masking the unprincipled selfishness of Wickham.
Elizabeth is forced to see how completely she has been taken in, how little ground she has had to go upon in either case, save vanity piqued on the one hand and gratified on the other. She shrinks abashed before her own errors of observation and reasoning—she who has been so proud of her penetration and cleverness.
She hates to remember her zealous support of Wickham, of whom she had literally known nothing, except that he was handsome and agreeable, and from the stories he has told her himself with a frankness which, even if he had been perfectly sincere, would have been imprudent and indelicate in so recent an acquaintance.
She recoils from the recollection of her sharpness and uncalled-for taunts to Darcy, and is brought to admit that his warm, constant regard for her, in the teeth of her unconcealed dislike to him, has been no common compliment from such a man; though she must still think that he urged his suit in an improper and unamiable manner.
When Elizabeth returns to Longbourn, she is doubtful whether or not she ought to tell so much of what she has learned of Wickham’s real character as to open the eyes of their common acquaintances; but hearing, to her immense relief, that the militia regiment stationed at Meryton is under orders to go into camp at Brighton, and that Wickham must leave the neighbourhood, in company with the rest of the officers, in the course of a fortnight, she resolves, with the approval of her sister Jane, who has been the astonished listener to all Elizabeth’s adventures, to leave Wickham the opportunity of redeeming the past, by refraining from the uncongenial task of exposing him to his associates.
The two younger Miss Bennets, in company with the more thoughtless girls of their immediate circle, are sunk in the depths of despair at the prospect of the loss of liveliness in their society, which the removal of the regiment involves. But Lydia, who has been loudest in her lamentations, is more than consoled, for the present, by an invitation from the wife of the colonel of the regiment, a newly-married woman, little older and hardly less empty-headed than Lydia herself, to accompany her on a visit to Brighton.
As Lydia’s ideas of felicity are summed up in flirting noisily with six officers at once, Brighton and its camp appear like Paradise to her.
In some respects, Lydia Bennet and George Wickham are not unlike the fast heroine and lady-killing hero of many modern novels. It is edifying to contemplate the unqualified contempt and reprobation with which Jane Austen viewed the couple.