Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/112

 of yours. My aunt's intelligence had given me hope, and I was determined at once to know everything'

Shall you ever have courage to announce to Lady Catherine what is to befall her?'

I am more likely to want time than courage Elizabeth. But it ought to be done, and, if you will give me a sheet of paper, it shall be done directly.'

And, if I had not a letter to write myself, I might sit by you, and admire the evenness of your writing, as another young lady once did. But I have an aunt, too, who must not be longer neglected.

Darcy is quite as well drawn a character as Elizabeth, for though his pride and self-will are, in the early part of the story, almost overpowering, we always see the really ﬁne nature behind them, and we can feel that when he meets with a woman who will respect him, but never stoop to flatter his faults, and whom he can love enough to bear with her laughing at him, he will be a most devoted and excellent husband. If the book can be said to have any defects, they are—first, that it is impossible to see how such a woman as Mrs. Bennet could have two daughters like Jane and Elizabeth; secondly, at Lydia's elopement is a disagreeable incident, told too much in detail, and made needlessly prominent. It is intended to bring Wickham's baseness into greater relief, and to show how Darcy's love could even triumph over such a connection; but it is revolting to depict a girl of sixteen so utterly lost to all sense of decency as Lydia is, and the plot would have worked out quite well without it. Still, at the time Jane Austen wrote, she might have pointed to many episodes in great writers that were far more strangely chosen, and Lydia's story does not really occupy much