Again, Darcy remained silent, waiting for the whole of the story. He recognized her dramatics—had dealt with them on more than one occasion over the years. He would not let her bait him. “I knew better,” she chastised herself, “but I succumbed to Anne’s need for company. A mother allows her only child freedoms when sound reason says otherwise.”

“You have always been most charitable,” Darcy said, silently wishing that his aunt would just come to the point. “And I cannot imagine our cousin would pollute your drawing room with unsavory characters.”

Darcy counted his cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam as one of his closest friends. They served as joint guardians for Darcy’s sister, Georgiana, and they knew each other as well as two very private men could. In fact, there had been a time when Darcy worried that he might lose Elizabeth to his cousin. They had taken to each other immediately, often falling into easy conversation of Kent and of Hertfordshire, of traveling and staying at home, of books and of music.After her initial refusal of him, Darcy had spent many miserable nights imagining that she might have readily accepted Edward, but his cousin’s position as a second son of an earl demanded that he choose a woman of fortune. Edward held a title, but he could not afford to fall in love with a woman of Elizabeth’s small means. For Darcy, this had proved little comfort during those months when he pined for a “lost” Elizabeth.

“One of your cousin’s associates is a Lieutenant Harwood, a man of no consequence,” Lady Catherine said. “Although Edward Fitzwilliam brings honor to our family, I admit to finding the military an objectionable occupation. It brings persons of obscure birth into undue distinction and raises men to honors, which their fathers and grandfathers never dreamt of. A man is in greater danger in the military of being insulted by the rise of one whose father, his father might have disdained to speak to.”