Pride and Prejudice - Chaelisa Edition

Chapter 10

The day passed much as the day before had done. Mrs. Hurst and Ms. Kim Miyeon had spent some hours of the morning with the invalid, who continued, though slowly, to mend; and in the evening Roseanne joined their party in the drawing-room. The loo-table, however, did not appear. Miss Manoban was writing, and Ms. Kim Miyeon, seated near her, was watching the progress of her letter and repeatedly calling off her attention by messages to her sister. Mr. Hurst and Miss Kim were at piquet, and Mrs. Hurst was observing their game.

Roseanne took up some needlework, and was sufficiently amused in attending to what passed between Manoban and her companion. The perpetual commendations of the lady, either on her handwriting, or on the evenness of her lines, or on the length of her letter, with the perfect unconcern with which her praises were received, formed a curious dialogue, and was exactly in union with her opinion of each.

"How delighted Ms. Manoban will be to receive such a letter!" She made no answer. "You write uncommonly fast."

"You are mistaken. I write rather slowly."

"How many letters you must have occasion to write in the course of a year! Letters of business, too! How odious I should think them!"

"It is fortunate, then, that they fall to my lot instead of yours."

"Pray tell your sister that I long to see her."

"I have already told her so once, by your desire."

"I am afraid you do not like your pen. Let me mend it for you. I mend pens remarkably well."

"Thank you-but I always mend my own."

"How can you contrive to write so even?"

She was silent.

"Tell your sister I am delighted to hear of her improvement on the harp; and pray let her know that I am quite in raptures with her beautiful little design for a table, and I think it infinitely superior to Miss Grantley's."

"Will you give me leave to defer your raptures till I write again? At present I have not room to do them justice."

"Oh! it is of no consequence. I shall see her in January. But do you always write such charming long letters to her, Miss Manoban?"

"They are generally long; but whether always charming it is not for me to determine."

"It is a rule with me, that a person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill."

"That will not do for a compliment to Manoban, Miyeon," cried her sister Miss Kim Jisoo, "because he does not write with ease. She studies too much for words of four syllables. Do not you, Manoban?"

"My style of writing is very different from yours."

"Oh!" cried Ms. Kim Miyeon, "Jisoo writes in the most careless way imaginable. She leaves out half her words, and blots the rest."

"My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them- by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents."

"Your humility, Miss Kim," said Roseanne, "must disarm reproof."

"Nothing is more deceitful," said Manoban, "than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast."

"And which of the two do you call my little recent piece of modesty?"

"The indirect boast; for you are really proud of your defects in writing, because you consider them as proceeding from a rapidity of thought and carelessness of execution, which, if not estimable, you think at least highly interesting. The power of doing anything with quickness is always prized much by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance. When you told Mrs. Park this morning that if you ever resolved upon quitting Netherfield you should be gone in five minutes, you meant it to be a sort of panegyric, of compliment to yourself-and yet what is there so very laudable in a precipitance which must leave very necessary business undone, and can be of no real advantage to yourself or anyone else?"