“Oh!my dear Lydia,”she cried,“when shall we meet again?”
Mr.Wickham's adieus were much more affectionate than his wife's.He smiled,looked handsome,and said many pretty things.
“He is as fine a fellow,”said Mr.Bennet,as soon as they were out of the house,“as ever I saw. He simpers, and smirks, and makes love to us all.I am prodigiously proud of him.I defy even Sir William Lucas himself to produce a more valuable son-in-law.”
His wife represented to him how absolutely necessary such an attention would be from all the neighbouring gentlemen,on his returning to Netherfield.
“Yet it is hard,”she sometimes thought,“that this poor man cannot come to a house which he has legally hired,without raising all this speculation!I will leave him to himself.”
Mr.Wickham was so perfectly satisfied with this conversation that he never again distressed himself,or provoked his dear sister Elizabeth,by introducing the subject of it;and she was pleased to find that she had said enough to keep him quiet.
The subject which had been so warmly canvassed between their parents, about a twelvemonth ago, was now brought forward again.