The post-chaise will be at the gate before the house is stirring, and by noon you will be on the London road, thinking of the law, or of your uncle’s displeasure, or of nothing at all.

I write this because it is the only piece of extravagance I shall allow myself, and because the fire is not yet lit to burn it. Yesterday evening you danced five times with Mary Lloyd and looked very grave whenever your eyes wandered toward the corner where I was pinned between Mrs. Lefroy and the fire-screen. She was very good; she talked incessantly of the weather and the roads to town, so that neither of us should be obliged to hear what our faces were saying. She is your aunt, and she loves you; she has six thousand pounds of her own and knows to a shilling what an Irish barrister without an estate must look for in a wife. It is not an unpardonable thing in her to save you from a young woman whose only portion is twenty pounds in the five per cents and an over-supply of nonsense.

You told me at Ashe that I was the most formidable flirt in the county. It was very prettily said, and I laughed, as I was meant to laugh; but you knew, and I knew, that the nonsense was the only screen we had against the arithmetic. We danced because we could not afford to sit still and look at the ledger.

The arithmetic has won, of course. It always does in Hampshire. An uncle in Ireland with three livings in his gift is an argument not to be answered by a sprigged muslin and a tolerable pair of eyes. I do not blame him, and I do not blame you. You are quite right to pack your trunk and ride away to Lincoln’s Inn. It would be a very poor bargain to exchange your prospects for the pleasure of seeing me mend my stockings by the parlor window for the next twenty years, while we waited for an old man to die in County Longford.

We have behaved with great propriety. No promises were given; no letters are to pass; your family will speak of the delightful balls at Manydown, and mine will observe that Mr. Lefroy was an agreeable young man who talked very sensibly of Blackstone. The world will be satisfied that nothing has occurred.

Go to London, then, and study the statutes. Learn how property is entailed, and how settlements are drawn, and how a man of ambition must purchase his independence. I shall keep to my small square of paper, where the people, at least, are allowed to marry whom they please without being sent to town by their relations.

Farewell. The horses are coming up the lane.

The fire in the grate was dead by three, and I have had six hours to consider the value of four thousand a year when set against the person of Harris Bigg-Wither.

It was easily done by candlelight. An evening’s work to ensure that Steventon need never be begged of James, that our mother should have her winter coals without reckoning the cost of the sack, and that you and I should sit by a hearth which no brother’s wife has the legal right to measure out to us. There was even a great show of sense in it. A woman of seven-and-twenty with neither fortune nor face cannot expect to be courted with verses; she must take the estate where she finds it, and be thankful that the heir has no worse vices than an ungainly tongue and a temper that turns sullen when his dogs do not obey him.

But the sun is coming up over the park, and the frost shows the ruts where the sheep went yesterday.

It will not do. The house is very large, but it is not large enough to divide his ignorance from my own disgust for forty years. I listened to his breathing across the drawing-room last night after the thing was settled, and knew that if he took my hand again I should turn sick upon the carpet. To buy bread and shelter for my family by surrendering the only property I possess — which is the absolute command of my own disgust — is not prudence; it is a transaction for which there is another name in the market, though we wrap it up in settlements and call it a suitable match.

I must tell him before the servants bring the tea. The carriage must be hired at Basingstoke; we cannot stay to breakfast under his father’s roof after I have unpicked the bargain. There will be great anger, and Alethea will look upon me as a monster of ingratitude, and our brothers will say that Jane has thrown away Manydown for a whim. Let them say it. I would rather starve in lodgings upon bread and tea, with the right to think my own thoughts until the candle goes out, than be the mistress of this park and know myself the greatest fool that ever sold her soul for a carriage.

Cassandra must be woke. The trunks must be corded before the house is down.

The fog has settled over the Royal Crescent since Tuesday, and the coal we buy here burns down to a pale, sulphur-smelling ash that does not warm the knees. Below the parlour window, the chairs go rattling down toward the Pump Room with the old men inside them, their flannels wrapped about their legs, carried along like parcels to be steeped in the hot water.

My father has been eleven months in his grave at Walcot. We have had two letters from James to explain that fifty pounds a year is the utmost he can spare from the tithes, and a very handsome, affectionate sheet from Henry to say that his banking-house will match the sum, so that we shall never want for tea. We are four women living upon what is spared to us and the benevolence of our relations. Yesterday my mother spent three hours considering whether the parlour maid might be turned off and the scullery girl taught to curl hair, so that we might save four shillings in the month. This is the great sum of our daily converse. When Cassandra goes out with her basket to the butcher, she counts the halfpence in the palm of her glove before she turns the corner into the street.

The little deal desk sits upon the chest of drawers between the basin and the window. It has not been unlocked since Michaelmas.

The manuscript of the Watsons lies inside the drawer where I thrust it when the apothecary came up the stair to bleed my father. I took out three leaves this morning while the girl was sweeping the hearth. The ink is brown; the sentences look like the work of some silly girl who thought the world was an agreeable sort of place where an uncle might die at an opportune moment or a clever speech rescue an estate. It is impossible to go on with it. Emma Watson must go to church in her turned gown and sit by the window to watch the curate’s sister walk by in her ribbons, and there is no reason on earth why she should ever be delivered from the curate’s sister, because in Gay Street nobody is ever delivered from anything. The post brings no letters from Mr. Crosby. He paid his ten pounds for Susan two years ago, and keeps her in his cellar among the sermons and the treatises on the liver, and if I had ten pounds to buy her back I should be obliged to give them to the coal-merchant to keep my mother from coughing blood.

This, then, is the independence.

It was very grand to tell Cassandra at Manydown that I would rather starve in lodgings upon bread and tea than sell the command of my own disgust. Well, the tea is very thin, and the lodgings smell of boiled cabbage from the kitchen below, and the disgust is there still, but it has nothing to feed upon but our own small shifts and the insolence of the butcher’s boy. To refuse the market is not to escape it. One merely sits in a smaller room, counting the shillings that are not one’s own, while the street-cries drown out the few poor words that used to come when the house at Steventon was quiet.

I used to believe that if a woman kept her wits about her, the world could not touch her. It was a very pretty piece of presumption. The world does not need to break your head; it has only to take away your coals, and crowd you into three small rooms with an ailing mother and an empty purse, and let the noise of the carriages wear you into silence.

Let it lie. The girl has finished the grate. I must go down and help Cassandra turn the muslin.