It was not that she chose too much to discard.
It was that so little tempted her to keep it.
The room contained almost nothing a woman might wish to claim as the visible history of a marriage—no cherished trifle, no object invested by use with tenderness, no foolish purchase preserved merely because it had once promised pleasure. There was a shawl of decent quality folded in the drawer, but she handled it not as a favourite possession but as an article that might still serve. There was a china bowl painted with a blue border. She looked at it long enough for him to suppose it would be saved, then set it among the things to leave.
“You do not want that one?” he asked.
“It was a wedding present from a neighbour.”
“Then perhaps—”
“No.” She touched the edge with one finger and withdrew her hand. “I kept thinking I should use it properly when things were easier. There was never a proper time. It ought not to occupy another shelf merely because I once expected one.”
She said it calmly, almost lightly. Yet the last word failed her by the slightest degree.
Darcy understood then, or some portion of it. Not grief only for the man in the churchyard. Something more humiliating and more difficult to confess—grief for waste. For youth spent economizing, nursing, placating, postponing. For the small domestichopes by which women were trained to order their lives and which reality, in this instance, had taken one by one and made ridiculous.
He said nothing. He had learned enough of suffering in the last months to know that consolation, offered too soon, became vanity in the speaker.
She went to the window and lifted down a pot in which nothing had survived the winter.
“This may stay,” she said.
“The plant?”
“The pretence.”
That won from him an actual, surprised breath that was near laughter. She heard it and looked back as if startled to have provoked it.
“I beg your pardon. That was ungracious.”
“It was accurate,” he said.
The corner of her mouth moved. It did not become a smile, but the room was easier for the attempt.
They carried the table out together, then the box, then the second chair. On the third journey she asked whether he was certain he did not regret his bargain. The handcart wheel had found every rut between cottage and gate and the weather had left the lane too soft for comfort.
“I regret only the tenant’s letter I am no longer answering,” he said.
“That poor man may be ruined.”
“If so, he should not have expressed it in so many paragraphs.”
She lowered her eyes, and this time the half-laugh came properly, brief and thin and still more affecting than open weeping would have been.
When they returned to the bedchamber she had taken down from the mantel a packet of letters tied separately from the household papers. She stood with them in her hands, not moving.
“These, I think, must come with me at once.”
“Of course.”
She did not put them in the box. She held them against the front of her gown, both hands laid over them as if the pressure alone held her upright.
The gesture invited no question. Darcy nonetheless heard himself ask, with deliberate casualness, “You have much family correspondence, then, besides Miss Bennet’s?”
The effect on her was immediate and carefully suppressed. Her shoulders did not stiffen, yet he knew they wished to. Her face did not close, yet the openness left it.
“Not much,” she said. “Only what one does not throw away.”
