Chapter XXXIX — Pride and Prejudice

New private knowledge can meet old public chaos when you cannot warn without breaking another trust. In the second week of May Elizabeth, Jane, and Maria travel home from London toward Hertfordshire, meeting Kitty and Lydia at the inn where Mr. Bennet's carriage waits. The younger sisters display cold meat bought on credit, ugly bonnets, and triumphant news: the militia will encamp near Brighton in a fortnight, and Lydia begs their father to take the whole family for the summer. Elizabeth thinks with horror of Brighton and a whole campful of soldiers after one poor regiment already overset Meryton.

At table Lydia dismisses the waiter and announces Wickham is safe from marrying Mary King, who has gone to Liverpool. Elizabeth reflects that the coarseness of Lydia's sentiment was once her own liberal opinion of Wickham. All the way home Lydia chatters about husbands, Colonel Forster's dance, and dressing Chamberlayne as a woman while Wickham walks in, oblivious. At Longbourn the Lucases crowd the dining room; Mr. Bennet twice tells Elizabeth quietly he is glad she is back, and Mary gravely says she prefers a book to such pleasures while Lydia does not listen.

In the afternoon Elizabeth opposes walking to Meryton so the family will not appear in pursuit of officers, and because she dreads seeing Wickham while bound to silence about Georgiana. The regiment's removal is brief comfort. Within hours she finds the Brighton scheme under frequent discussion between her parents: her father has no intention of yielding, yet answers so vaguely and equivocally that Mrs. Bennet, though often disheartened, has never yet despaired of succeeding at last.