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“You talked with her?”

“No, most of my discussions are with Claire, often Robert is there too. But it was an instructive moment when she took the side of someone she hopes to be her family over someone who had been a member of her family all her life.”

“Did you have any subsequent conversations with Miss Bingley.”

“Not one. We even managed to miss each other during the receiving line for Bingley’s Ball. That evening was the last time I saw her but we did not speak. We avoided each other’s company. I was fine with the arrangement.”

“I have so many questions. I presume we will come to the ball shortly. What are your impressions of Mr. Bingley after spending four days at Netherfield Park?”

“My views on Mr. Bingley are fundamentally unchanged from the first evening at the Assembly. He is a gentleman in his manners and the way he conducts himself with others. But he has one huge flaw. He cannot control his sister. It was embarrassing the way she behaved as his hostess to their guests. He was just so ineffectual. Let me think.

“Maybe the best way I can describe it as using an example you will have seen yourself. It is time for spring cleaning at the house. The entrance carpet has soaked up a lot of rain and snow and mud over the winter. It is now going to be hung out in the yard and all the months of accumulated dirt is going to be beaten out. The five year old son of one of your servants is also given a carpet beater and everyone is happy for him to pretend to help. He follows what everyone else is doing but it is pointless. He is too small and his efforts are meaningless. When it comes to his sister, Mr. Bingley is that child with the carpet beater. He knows what he has to do but is incapable.”

“That is quite the analogy.”

“At first I was dismissing him as a puppy, he needed to grow up. But it is just this one aspect, his younger sister, a harridan of the first order. With everyone else, with the servants, to the people throughout the neighbourhood be they gentlemen or tradesmen, he presents well. He was a much-valued dinner guest within weeks of taking the lease.”

“Is your sister now being courted by him?”

“No she is not. He had business in London after his ball and it was widely known in the neighbourhood. He announced that he would return in three or four days. Instead the day after he left his sister closed up Netherfield Park and the remainder of the party returned to London. No one had returned before my own departure. Miss Bingley sent a letter to Jane but she did not share the contents with me. She did blame me for the Bingleys leaving; my rude behaviour supposedly drove them away.”

“I see. From your face I can tell there is more.”

Elizabeth spent the next hour regaling Lady Maria with the arrival and antics of the Rev William Collins.

“Did you take an instinctive dislike to him, as Miss Bingley did with you?”

“So much has happened that I cannot be sure, but I would like to say no. Although as I think about your question there may be some truth to it. All I can fall back on is that I have several reasons to dislike Mr. Collins whereas I am in the dark as to why Miss Bingley acts as she does with me.”

“His verbosity?”

“That is by far the worst of it. There is just not peace when he is around. This is hindsight talking, but once he decided I was to be his wife he got worse. The worst of it was the unrelenting nature of his voice. But he also was endless in his praise of his patroness. If I never hear the name Lady Catherine de Bourgh again it will be too soon.”

“Lady Catherine de Bourgh?”

Elizabeth nodded.

“Do you know her?”

“I know of her rather than know her personally. She is close to a decade older than me and was already married when I came out. But her personality was still spoken about. She had a reputation of being as an uninformed windbag. She spoke of things she knew nothing about, not that it stopped her.”

“I have never met her but I can see why she appointed Mr. Collins to the living in her gift.”

“What else of Mr. Collins?”

Elizabeth sighed.

“He was not a good example of a man of the cloth. Even before his proposal Mary and I had noted his failings. He displayed five of the deadly sins and parts of the sixth. The only one he never exhibited was wrath.”

“And the partial one?”

Elizabeth flushed.

“Lust. His looks bordered on leers when he thought he was unobserved.”

“At Mr. Bingley’s ball he asked you for the first set?”

“He asked me several days before the date of the ball. I had no way of refusing him without Mrs. Bennet screeching to the high heavens. I was resigned to the spectacle but he sabotaged his own plans with his incompetence at the basic social virtues. He stood on my foot seven minutes into the first dance. I had to limp off the floor and was unable to dance for the rest of the ball.”