imprudence of either, by receiving them at Longbourn.”
A long dispute followed this declaration; but Mr. Bennet was firm: it

soon led to another; and Mrs. Bennet found, with amazement and horror,

that her husband would not advance a guinea to buy clothes for his

daughter. He protested that she should receive from him no mark of

affection whatever on the occasion. Mrs. Bennet could hardly comprehend

it. That his anger could be carried to such a point of inconceivable

resentment as to refuse his daughter a privilege, without which her

marriage would scarcely seem valid, exceeded all that she could believe

possible. She was more alive to the{381} disgrace, which her want of new

clothes must reflect on her daughter’s nuptials, than to any sense of

shame at her eloping and living with Wickham a fortnight before they

took place.
Elizabeth was now most heartily sorry that she had, from the distress of

the moment, been led to make Mr. Darcy acquainted with their fears for

her sister; for since her marriage would so shortly give the proper

termination to the elopement, they might hope to conceal its

unfavourable beginning from all those who were not immediately on the

spot.
She had no fear of its spreading farther, through his means. There were

few people on whose secrecy she would have more confidently depended;

but at the same time there was no one whose knowledge of a sister’s

frailty would have mortified her so much. Not, however, from any fear of

disadvantage from it individually to herself; for at any rate there

seemed a gulf impassable between them. Had Lydia’s marriage been

concluded on the most honourable terms, it was not to be supposed that

Mr. Darcy would connect himself with a family, where to every other

objection would now be added an alliance and relationship of the nearest

kind with the man whom he so justly scorned.
From such a connection she could not wonder that he should shrink. The