The ladies of Longbourn call at Netherfield, and in due form the visit is returned.
Jane grows steadily on the goodwill of the two sisters. The mother is found intolerable and the younger girls not worth speaking to. A wish to be better acquainted with the two eldest, however, is made known.
If Her Sister Will Not Smile
Jane receives this with pleasure. Elizabeth is not so easily satisfied.
There is a superciliousness in how those sisters treat everybody, she thinks, and it is not much softened for Jane either.
Charlotte thinks about it differently. Jane, she says, is too composed.
Bingley clearly likes her, but Jane does not show as much in return, and a man left without certainty can simply stay where he is.
In nine cases out of ten a woman had better show more affection than she feels, Charlotte says.
Elizabeth defends her sister. Jane is the same with everyone by nature, and her quietness is not the absence of feeling.
Charlotte does not give way. If a woman conceals her affection that well from the man himself, she may lose the chance of fixing him altogether.
Then she goes a step further. Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance, she says, and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person you are to live beside.
Elizabeth laughs. You would never choose that way yourself.
This is a moment the reader will come back to.
From the Face to the Eyes
Elizabeth is busy watching Bingley lean toward her sister.
So she never suspects that she herself has come into the view of his friend.
Darcy had scarcely allowed her to be pretty. He had looked at her without admiration at the ball, and when they met again he looked at her only to criticise.
But it was after he had fixed it, with himself and with his friends, that her face had hardly a good feature in it. Only then did he find how uncommonly intelligent the expression of her dark eyes made the whole of it.
The discoveries that followed were no more welcome to him.
His critical eye had caught more than one failure of symmetry in her figure, and still he had to grant that it was light and pleasing. He had declared her manners were not those of the fashionable world, and still he was caught by their easy playfulness.
Elizabeth knows none of this.
To her he is still the man who makes himself agreeable nowhere, and who did not think her handsome enough to stand up with.
At Lucas Lodge
He begins to wish to know more of her. Before speaking to her himself, he listens to what she says to other people.
She notices him doing it.
It happens at Sir William’s, with a large party assembled. Elizabeth asks Charlotte what Mr. Darcy means by listening to her conversation with Colonel Forster.
He is looking for something to find fault with, she decides. And if she does not stand her ground now, she says, she will soon be afraid of him.
A little later Sir William tries to bring the two of them together for a dance. Darcy, to everyone’s surprise, was quite ready to take her hand.
It was Elizabeth who stepped back.
She declines without any show of offence, smiling as she does it. She had not walked that way in search of a partner, she says, and Mr. Darcy is all politeness.
A Pair of Fine Eyes
Darcy watches her go. There is nothing put out in his face.
Caroline comes over to him. She can guess what he is thinking about, she says.
He is considering how insupportable it would be to pass many evenings in this manner. She says it with confidence.
Darcy’s answer is short. Her conjecture is entirely wrong.
“I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow.” (Chapter 6)
Whose eyes, Caroline asks. He gives the name. Miss Elizabeth Bennet.
Caroline decides to take it as a joke. When is she to wish him joy, then, and what a mother-in-law Mrs. Bennet will make.
Today, An Evening Nobody Read
Nobody in this chapter reads wrongly, and nobody reads rightly either.
Elizabeth takes the attention turned on her for fault-finding, and Caroline takes his silence for boredom. Darcy finds his own feeling and reads it only as something to guard against.
Three people go three different ways past the same evening.
What this series does is visible here all at once. We read other people, other people read us, and those readings harden separately without ever meeting.
The two of them will keep misreading each other for chapters to come. What corrects a misreading, it turns out, is not a sharper eye but more facts.
Have you ever found out long afterwards that someone was thinking something entirely different about you?