This unfortunate incident occurred at that age when a young woman is most vulnerable, when the accomplishments of youth had not yet been learnt so long so as to have solidified into the more enduring, confident grace of womanhood. Guilt and shame left a lasting mark: such confidence, as might otherwise have flowered, was swallowed up in the humiliation of her brother’s evident disapprobation and disappointment. At the time of life when Georgiana should have found herself completely happy—happy in the improvement of her mind, accomplishment, and felicity, which naturally attends birth, fortune, and—if not the beauty of a fashionable kind—the more enduring attractions of a pleasing figure and regular, pretty features, by the time of her coming of age at sixteen—Georgiana was become more, rather than less, diffident. Although the shameful episode was all but forgot by the few who knew of it, she was become inured to the fallibility of her own judgement and the paucity of her own powers of attraction. Approving and constant through the years of sorrow and change, Mademoiselle Blanche alone was privy to the enduring affliction of her mistress, framed as it was by the certainty that no amount of subsequent probity and kindness could ever atone for her deficiencies of judgement, self-assurance, elegant airs, and easy conversation.

It was Mademoiselle Blanche, therefore, who held the position of comforter and approver in the loneliest days of Georgiana’s childhood, keeping away the terrors of the night, exploring the rooms of Pemberley when the weather was inclement, and the gardens around the house if it was fine; was daily her audience at the piano-forte, and followed her to the paddock to see her pony; supervised the masters, glaring disconcertingly when she judged they were too severe; and stood as confidant and friend whether doing sums, reading novels in the safety of the bed-cloathes, or writing poetry as consolation to an imaginary lover. And, in Georgiana’s womanhood, it was Blanche who gave Georgiana courage to resist, sweetly but steadily, attempts from all quarters to marshal potential suitors, by being a symbol of all she loved about Pemberley and a reminder of the deprivations she would face in leaving it. And so, Georgiana Darcy, possessing birth, beauty, accomplishment, and all the credentials which any gentleman of sense could wish for in a wife, and in spite of the best efforts of her friends, remained through her five-and-twentieth year unmarried, and quite likely ever to remain so. Unlike her Aunt de Bourgh’s officiousness on behalf of her daughter, Anne, Georgiana had no horror of a future as a single woman. She was genuinely content to remain unmarried so long as her family went on as it always had; the family circle, as in Mozart’s opera, was of exactly the right number—any additions or diminutions to its number must render it imperfect.

CHAP. 4.