Elizabeth sighed, resigned to being so easily manipulated. “Little boxes.”
He stopped in confusion. “Care to elaborate?”
Elizabeth hated the awkward position, but since she was willing to do anything for Jane, she persevered.
“Of course! I find that I cannot quite bring myself to speak in plain and unambiguous language so early in a conversation, so I must use analogies. Are you willing to entertain such an idea?”
“I shall follow your lead. I trust you to have your sister’s best interest at heart, as do I.”
“Even above your own?”
“Of course.”
Elizabeth gently took hold of the gentleman’s elbow, led him to the side of the path, and pointed to a small shrub. “Let us imagine that is a little box.”
She used her hands to outline its imaginary dimensions, pantomimed opening a lid, pulled something from her chest, and dumped it inside.
“For the next hour, I should like to dump all my propriety into the box.”
She continued her motions. “And here we have politeness, decorum, propriety, manners… all the little lies we use to make social discourse easier.”
She looked up at him, satisfied that he watched her intently, but did not seem intimidated by the exercise.
“Here we leave embarrassment, pride, anger, fear, and temper. All I have left is honesty—clear, brutal honesty.”
She pantomimed closing the lid. “That is my little box. Will you do the same?”
The gentleman stepped right up to the shrub and opened his own box. He repeated her motions. “Propriety, fear, embarrassment, manners, decorum, pride… all as you specified. I shall give you only honesty.”
Elizabeth nodded, took his arm, and started walking in a direction that would take them out of Jane’s sight. She did not want him distracted.
Taking a deep breath, she said, “Now, I want to talk about other boxes. I find the analogy useful.”
He chuckled. “Perhaps we should return to the boxes and add prevarication as well?”
Elizabeth laughed, liking the gentleman more and more.
“We all live our lives in various boxes. Families are like a box, or a house. There are various relationships inside the box, and others between those in the box and those outside. It is useful to have the box to distinguish what is more tightly connected from what is less so.”
“I can agree, though your experience is more extensive than mine. My mother died young, so my family box never held more than three people, and we were all men or boys.”
A pang of pity for such an upbringing struck Elizabeth, but pity was not useful.
“That is unfortunate, though understanding it might help our cause. It could help explain your difficulty in communicating with the fair sex. I was raised in a box with 6 females and 1 male, though, to be fair, my father made his own box, and most of us were seldom invited in. For all intents and purposes, the vast majority of Jane’s life and mine passed in a box filled with women.”
“I imagine we could find even more kinds of boxes for upbringing, but those are sufficient for our needs.”
“Exactly. Here is the thing about boxes. Sometimes, you can see more clearly frominsidethe box because you are there, with a full view of all that goes on. However—this is important—sometimes it takes someoneoutsidethe box to see clearly, because those inside are distracted by all the noise and bother in the box, or because they are so accustomed to being there that they do not notice what is right in front of their eyes. History clouds their judgement. They may not even be aware there are different boxes in the world.”
The gentleman nodded. “I follow. It is a perfect analogy.”
Now they were getting to the crux of the problem.
“My father is a good example. He was unsatisfied with the isolation provided by the normal box surrounding a family, so he built another boxinsidethe home. In his case, it was his library. He would occasionally pass messages through the wall to the rest of us, and even more rarely to the outside world. There, in his own little box, he collected his treasures, left the raising and marrying of his daughters to anyone who wasnot him, and treated his box as his entire world. I esteemed him until recently because he did me a great favour as a child, but now I know I did so only because he gave me a slightly larger window into his boxthan my sisters had, and I found things I liked there when I was allowed inside.”
The man looked pained. “I will not censure the man—”
Elizabeth snapped, “Take that back!It smacks of politeness, which you promised to leave in the shrub-box. You may perfectly well censure him all you want during this conversation, but you arenotto moderate your tone for me. I am more resilient than you might think, and the chances of you chastising him any harder than Jane already has are slim.”
