Mr. Bingley arrived. Mrs. Bennet, through the assistance of servants, contrived to have the earliest tidings of it, that the period of anxiety and fretfulness on her side might be as long as it could.She counted the days that must intervene before their invitation could be sent;hopeless of seeing him before. But on the third morning after his arrival in Hertfordshire,she saw him, from her dressing-room window,enter the paddock and ride towards the house.
“I begin to be sorry that he comes at all,”said Jane to her sister.“It would be nothing;I could see him with perfect indifference, but I can hardly bear to hear it thus perpetually talked of. My mother means well;but she does not know,no one can know,how much I suffer from what she says.Happy shall I be,when his stay at Netherfield is over!”
“I wish I could say anything to comfort you,”replied Elizabeth;“but it is wholly out of my power.You must feel it;and the usual satisfaction of preaching patience to a sufferer is denied me, because you have always so much.”
Elizabeth, particularly, who knew that her mother owed to the latter the preservation of her favourite daughter from irremediable infamy, was hurt and distressed to a most painful degree by a distinction so ill applied.