Even Lady Catherine, Mr. Collins’s patroness and mistress of the Hunsford manor of Rosings, was unable to redirect Mr. Collins’s grief through the usual mechanisms of insult and interference. Arrogant, dictatorial, and disdainful of the feelings of everyone of inferior rank and consequence that—as the widowed daughter of an Earl and the present Mr. Darcy’s aunt—encompassed nearly everyone of her acquaintance, Her Ladyship had been so affable and condescending as to advise Mr. Collins of his unsuitability, respecting both situation and aptitude to the raising of his daughter, and very generously recommending that Charlotte’s people should have the care of her. Even the deferential Mr. Collins had been deeply shocked by Lady Catherine’s frank assessments at such a time and had, for some days, not called at Rosings with quite his usual frequency. However, as it was impossible Mr. Collins’s behaviour could be otherwise than that which Lady Catherine vouchsafed to advise, he accordingly went into Hertfordshire for assistance and sympathy. Had Lady Catherine foreseen that the product of her officiousness would establish another Miss Bennet, this time as the new mistress of the Hunsford parsonage, she willingly would have left off all such congenial hints in the future.

In the months following his Charlotte’s death, when able to depute his duties to some parishless curate, Mr. Collins filled his days in solitary walks in the pathways adjoining Lucas Lodge in Hertfordshire. There, his perambulations would often take him near to the park at Longbourn. In this place he would—with a remarkable frequency—discover Mary Bennet seated in the copse reading one of her accustomed tracts on religious subjects and self-improvement. As she read from Fordyce or More, or some other writer of a serious stamp, he would gratefully spend many an hour listening to that which he should already have known, and, in the solemn recitation of those thread-bare proverbs and platitudes, received what assistance he might to assuage his present affliction. For the first time in his life, Mr. Collins’s reflections produced a consciousness of his own want of attention to those instructions best suited to the restoration of his peace in those hours of change and loss. Had he attended with greater industry to the philosophy of his religion, he began to understand, he might have spared himself some portion of suffering. He honoured Mary for her application and taste, and believed himself indebted to her as the mechanism of his apperception, and the more secular benefits found in her singular sympathy for his grief.