Darcy rolled his eyes and then stepped heavily on his cousin’s booted foot, for which encouragement to piety he was rewarded with an elbow in his side. They sat down, Darcy putting space between himself and Fitzwilliam. Another grin flickered across the Colonel’s face as the two turned their attention to the Reverend Doctor’s sermon upon the Gospel of St. Matthew, Chapter 21.

By the time the good Doctor came to the multitudes of Jerusalem spreading their garments and branches in the way, Fitzwilliam had leaned back and, with crossed arms, fallen into a pose that could well be mistaken for a nap. Darcy shifted his position, placing his boots closer to the foot warmers, and assayed to attend to the sermon, which had departed from the text and now drifted into the realm of philosophical discourse. It was rather the same sort of plea to the rational mind and self-interested morality that he had heard expounded innumerable times before. The “infirmity of the nature of man” was lamented, and the “occasional failings and sudden surprises” of the petty transgressions he was heir to lightly touched upon and softly laid at the feet of the “natural frailty” that resided in the human breast.

Natural frailty! Darcy stirred at the familiar expression and looked down at the tips of his boots, his lips compressed in an unforgiving line as he tested the appellative against his own experience at the hands of a certain other. The exercise produced unwelcome implications. Was he tamely to accept “frailty” as the explanation — nay, the excuse — for behavior as invidious as that which George Wickham had visited upon his sister, Georgiana, and himself? Was he expected to pity Wickham for his weakness, succor him? Resentment, as bitter as it was cold, reawakened in his chest, and the Reverend Doctor was attended to with a more critical ear.

“In such times,” intoned the minister, “we must lay hold of the unqualified mercy of the Supreme Being, who will, in nowise, hold us to an account so strict as to end in our disappointment, but who offers us now in Christ the cordial of a moderated, rational requisition of Divine justice. If sincerity has been your watchword and the performance of your duty has been your creed, then with justified complacency you may rest upon the evidence of your lives.”