Pride and Prejudice and Kitties, стр. 19

He appeared quite distracted, but catching sight of Elizabeth’s tail waving under the couch, thought to inquire after her health. Venturing out of her hiding place, Elizabeth answered coldly and immediately commenced licking her paw.

A long silence followed, during which Mr. Darcy hopped onto a chair, hopped down and then back up again, then began:

“In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”

Elizabeth’s astonishment was beyond expression. She stopped licking her paw, stared at him, and was silent.

This Mr. Darcy considered sufficient encouragement, and he went on with gentlemanly trills and cat calls to communicate what he had long felt. He was most articulate, but not only about his passionate attachment to Elizabeth. He also dwelt with warmth on all the reasons their union was a degradation to him by virtue of Elizabeth’s common pedigree on her mother’s side, and inferior connections, particularly her rat-hunting uncle in Cheap-side. He made it abundantly clear that if he could have resisted her, he certainly would have. But, as he had not been successful in repressing his feelings, he fervently hoped she would put him out of his misery and accept his paw in marriage.

Arching her back, Elizabeth composed herself as best she could. She then made it clear that though she wished she could feel grateful for the honor of his offer, she must refuse him.

Leaping up to the mantle, Mr. Darcy stared at her in disbelief.

“Cat got your tongue?” asked Elizabeth archly.

Darcy recollected himself. “And this is all the reply which I am to have the honor of expecting?! I might, perhaps, wish to be informed why, with so little endeavor at civility, I am thus rejected.”

“And I,” replied Elizabeth, “might as well inquire why, with so evident a design of offending and insulting me, you chose to tell me that your regard for me rubbed your fur the wrong way! And what about the unhappiness you caused my dear sister Jane by separating her from Mr. Bingley?”

Mr. Darcy did not deny it.

“And the injuries you inflicted on poor Wickham?” went on Elizabeth.

“His injuries!” snarled Mr. Darcy. “Oh, it was a cat-fight indeed. But Wickham has no injuries to resent.”

“You have deprived him of at least six of his nine lives, and of that independence which is both the will and wish of every cat.”

“And this,” Mr. Darcy said after a pause, “is your opinion of me?”

Elizabeth hissed.

A moment later, mortified and ashamed by what his feelings had been, and by Elizabeth’s censure and scorn, Mr. Darcy hastily quit the room.

The scene left Elizabeth in a pitiful state. When she thought of all that had just passed between Mr. Darcy and herself, the confusion and tumult of her mind was great. A moment later, she heard Lady Cat’s carriage in the lane, and reflecting how little able she was to present herself to Charlotte’s scrutiny, she hastily retreated upstairs to her room, her ears flattened against her head.

“Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections?” [said Darcy] “To congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?”

Elizabeth felt herself growing more angry every moment; yet she tried to the utmost to speak with composure when she said,

“You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner.”

She saw him start at this, but he said nothing, and she continued, “You could not have made the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it.”

Again his astonishment was obvious; and he looked at her with an expression of mingled incredulity and mortification. She went on.

“From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that groundwork of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immoveable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”