When the family party go in to dinner, Lydia, with eager parade, walks up to her mother’s right hand, saying triumphantly to her eldest sister, “Ah, Jane, I take your place now, and you must go lower, because I am a married woman.”
After dinner the bride retires to show her ring, and boast of being married, to the housekeeper and maid-servants.
When the ladies are all together again in the breakfast-parlour, which a hundred years ago did duty as a drawing-room, unless on state occasions, Mrs. Wickham patronises her whole family by giving them a general invitation to Newcastle, where she hopes there will be balls, and she will take care to find good partners for her sisters. After her father and mother go away, one or two of the girls may be left behind, when their chaperon expresses a sanguine hope that she will get husbands for them before the winter is over.
“Thank you for my share of the favour,” says Elizabeth, “but I do not particularly like your way of getting husbands.”
“Sour grapes! spiteful thing!” we can imagine Lydia saying, hardly below her breath. Do we not see her before us, as large as life, in all her native colours, the pert, hoidenish, vulgar-minded girl—as destitute of delicacy as of dutifulness, or sweet unselfishness, or gentle affection—who has become, by some strange, sad chance, a favourite in the literature of the day? I appeal to my readers—Is she not still the same, though the fashion of her dress, or the manner in which she wears her hair, and a few of her phrases, may be altered, and though—alas! for the lower tone of much modern English fiction—she is now held up to approbation instead of reprobation.
In the course of her shameless boasting about her marriage, Lydia lets out before her sisters that Mr. Darcy was present.
“Mr. Darcy!” exclaims Elizabeth, in utter bewilderment.
“Oh! yes, he was to come there with Wickham, you know. But, gracious me, I quite forgot! I ought not to have said a word about it. I promised them so faithfully. What will Wickham say? It was to be such a secret.”
“If it was to be such a secret,” says the honourable Jane, “say not another word on the subject. You may depend upon my seeking no farther.”
“Oh! certainly,” says Elizabeth, though burning with curiosity, “we will ask you no questions.”