“It gets worse. The neighbourhood will concoct all the same elements and use their 79% chatter to remind her of itconstantly. She will be subject to derision for disappointed hopes. Our mother will feed the gossip, which will come back to further inflame her, which will further… you get my drift. It will become a vicious circle. People will deride her for feeling poorly, which will make her feel worse, and so on.Do you concur?”
“I have seen it happen,” Kep said. “I do not know your sister, but it sounds like the way this sort of thing often proceeds.”
“I believe you are right, Lizzy,” Mary said. “You or I would laugh it off and be right as rain in a month, but Jane will suffer for some time.”
“So, let me show you how it will happen. I shall make an atrocious job of it, but let me try.”
Elizabeth poked her hand out of the front of her greatcoat, picked up a stick, and drew a very rough graph in the mud.
She laughed. “That is terribly ugly, but you take my meaning. She will feel all the bad emotions—hurt, shame, embarrassment. These feelings follow a more or less ballistic trajectory. It will start mildly, when she hears the news, worsen as the gossip spreads and our mother relentlessly reminds her, then over several months, sink back to baseline.”
Newton studied the graph. “Crude, but effective—though assuming a ballistic curve is probably oversimplifying. Now, I suppose you would equate the area under the curve with total suffering?”
“It is very rough, but it shows what I wanted to convey: much suffering over a long time, gradually increasing, then eventually falling just as gradually when new gossip comes along. It is the way my sister is, and I would not change her for the world.”
From their faces, everyone followed. “Do you mind if I ask a question that might allow me to propose a slightlydifferentcurve, Mr Newton? I ask you not to violate any principle of conscience, so simply do not answer if it makes you uncomfortable.”
“Ask your question, ma’am.”
Elizabeth studied the ground for a moment and took a deep breath. “Does Mr Bingley do this sort of thing… often?”
Embarrassment overwhelmed her. “Pray, forget I said that. It is an impertinent question, and soliciting such gossip makes me uncomfortable.”
Mr Newton said softly, “Very good, Miss Elizabeth. At your suggestion, I will not answer the question. May I ask you one?”
“Of course!”
“Your sister. She is the tall, blonde, handsome one?”
“Yes.”
“Just one more question. As something of a man of science, I should be careless if I assumed she shares your surname. Is your sister Miss Bennet, Miss Markham, Miss Waverly, Miss Simpson, Miss Underwood, or Miss Beauchamp?”
Elizabeth frowned ferociously. “I applaud your thoroughness. She is Miss Bennet; I assume you wish to remove ambiguity because of all theotherpossibilities for a tall blonde lady courted by Mr Bingley.”
“Yes, ma’am. I would never gossip, but I wanted to be prepared to greet your sister properly should I ever meet her.”
Mary laughed, and Elizabeth joined her. “Clever, Mr Newton. I thank you.”
“Why the graph, Miss Elizabeth?” Kep asked. “I presume you are working your way up to that?”
“I am.”
Elizabeth returned to the graph with her ever-handy stick.
“The emotions we discussed before have rather long decay rates—something like a cannonball fired at a low angle and high speed. It takes time for the air to slow it, so it travels for some time before it comes to ground. Agreed?”
“I can see that. Basic Newtonian physics.”
Elizabeth chuckled. “The metaphor is not perfect, but suppose I point that same cannon almost straight into the air. Not absolutely straight, mind you, since the cannonball would fall on your head, but say 88 degrees.”
Kep took up the stick and drew the second curve.
“Its trajectory would be much higher, and it would come down much sooner and closer to the source.”
Kep added his best guess at the curve; drawing graphs in mud was harder than it sounded. “If your area under the curve theory holds, you can see that both the time spent suffering and the total suffering are reduced—though the maximum intensity is much higher.”
“All right, Elizabeth,” Mary said, “I will go along with the mathematics, and perhaps I will even give you that it is possible tovery roughlymodel human emotions with the same arithmetic as cannonballs, since they have so much in common.How do you propose to raise the angle of inclination of your canon to change the first curve to the second?”
