Pride and Prejudice — Chapter Twenty-Eight (Abridged)

Every object on the journey was new and interesting to Elizabeth, whose spirits were high after seeing Jane well and with the promise of a summer tour ahead. As they turned into the lane for Hunsford, every eye searched for the Parsonage, and Elizabeth smiled to remember all she had heard of its inhabitants.

At length the house came into view — garden, green pales, and laurel hedge all discernible from the road. Mr. Collins and Charlotte were waiting at the door, and the whole party tumbled out of the chaise with smiles and greetings. Charlotte welcomed her friend warmly, and Elizabeth was glad to find herself so affectionately received. Mr. Collins, quite unchanged by marriage, detained her at the gate with formal inquiries after her family before leading them in, welcoming them a second time to his home with ostentatious ceremony.

Elizabeth suspected he hoped displaying his comfortable rooms might make her regret refusing him, but she felt no such pang, and only wondered how Charlotte bore his conversation so cheerfully. When Mr. Collins said something his wife might reasonably blush at — which was not unseldom — Charlotte wisely seemed not to hear. After admiring every piece of furniture and hearing the London news repeated, they were taken out to see the garden, which Mr. Collins cultivated himself and clearly considered one of his chief glories. He pointed out every view with such minuteness that the beauty of it was quite lost, though nothing pleased him more than the glimpse of Rosings, a handsome house visible through a gap in the trees.

Charlotte later showed Elizabeth and Maria through the house herself, plainly pleased to do so without her husband's help. It was small but neatly and comfortably arranged, and Elizabeth gave her friend full credit for it — supposing that Mr. Collins was, happily, often forgotten.

At dinner the talk turned to Lady Catherine, still in the country. "You will have the honour of seeing her on Sunday at church," said Mr. Collins, "and I need not say you will be delighted. She is all affability and condescension. We dine at Rosings twice a week, and her ladyship always sends her carriage for us."

"Lady Catherine is a most respectable and attentive neighbour," Charlotte added.

"Exactly so," said Mr. Collins. "She is a woman one cannot regard with too much deference."

That evening, alone in her room, Elizabeth reflected with admiration on Charlotte's composure in managing so tiresome a husband, and tried to imagine how the visit — its quiet routine, its vexatious interruptions from Mr. Collins, its gaieties at Rosings — would unfold.

The next day, as she dressed for a walk, a great noise below sent Maria running upstairs in breathless agitation. "Come quickly, Eliza — there is such a sight!" She would explain nothing more, and they hurried down to find only two ladies stopped in a phaeton at the gate.

"Is this all?" laughed Elizabeth. "I expected the pigs had got into the garden, and it is only Lady Catherine and her daughter."

"That is not Lady Catherine," Maria corrected. "The older lady is Mrs. Jenkinson; the small one is Miss de Bourgh."

"How abominably rude, to keep Charlotte standing outside," said Elizabeth. "She looks sickly and cross — she will suit him very well indeed."

Sir William stood bowing in the doorway in earnest contemplation, plainly delighted by such greatness, while Mr. Collins and Charlotte talked at the gate. When the phaeton finally drove off, Mr. Collins hurried in to congratulate the girls: the whole party, Charlotte explained, was invited to dine at Rosings the very next day.