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Brooks Green was lit from top to bottom. The great doors stood open. And upon the steps, in a purple silk gown of a cut that had been the fashion under the Regency, with an enormous cap, and a stick, and a smile that filled the whole of the front of the house, stood Mrs. Jennings, waiting to receive her guests.

She was stouter, and rosier, and a great deal deafer than she had been; her cheeks were the colour of a good ripe apple, and her hair had turned to a fine white silk; but the eye beneath the cap was as bright, and shrewd, and brimming with mischievous curiosity, as it had been in the days when she had marched about Devonshire with a bundle of Peerages and a talent for matrimonial arithmetic. She embraced everybody and ushered them into the drawing-room.

“We are ready for tea, Bessy,” she commanded.

Among the many different conversations going at the same time as they enjoyed decadent tea, it was Mrs. Jennings who first said aloud a thing that everybody else had privately thought and nobody troubled to put into words.

“I have been watching those two girls of yours all afternoon, Elinor,” said she, with her cup halfway to her lips, “and I have come to a conclusion about them, which I shall give you for nothing, as I am in a generous humour. That eldest one is not Dashwood at all. Oh, she has your colouring, I grant you, and your way of folding her hands; but the inside of her, my dear, is her father over again, down to the ground. I said to Charlotte only last week, I said, if you had taken Edward Ferrars and Marianne Brandon, and raised the pair of them under one roof as brother and sister, you could not have improved upon the result. One of them would have spent the whole of his childhood worried about the other one and being entirely ignored for his pains.”

There was a small silence, of the kind that precedes a very large laugh; and then Marianne, who had been in the act of drinking her own tea, was obliged to set the cup down with some haste, and Elinor, beside her, put a hand quite helplessly over her mouth.

“Oh, Mrs. Jennings,” said Marianne, when she could speak, “you are entirely right, and I have never in my life been so insulted,” she joked.

“There, you see,” said Mrs. Jennings, with immense satisfaction, refilling her own cup as though she had settled a matter of national importance. “I am generally right about these things. It is Sarah who is the Dashwood in that nursery, whatever her name happens to be upon the register; and Mary is a Ferrars through and through, and always will be, and the sooner the pair of them make their peace with it the happier they will be with one another.”

Then Mrs. Jennings rose, and announced, in the voice of a woman who has spent forty years not being heard, and has taken measures:

“My dear, I have a great deal to say; but we shall have our dinner first. Charlotte! Where is Charlotte? Let the people in.”

It was a family party of twenty-three; and it was a matter of general observation, over the evening, that there was no other table in the West of England at which so many persons had so little to conceal.

There was Mr. Palmer, at the foot, in a black coat; there was Charlotte, in a green gown, who had grown very stout, and laughed at everything, and nothing that was said seemed to be able to alter it. There was old Sir John Middleton, from Barton, purple with pleasure, and rather deaf, who was in the middle of a very long story about a pheasant. There were the Dashwoods, in force: Mrs. Dashwood, upon Mr. Palmer’s right, in her lavender silk, with her ever-present handkerchief; and the whole of the Brandon and Ferrars party, ranged down one side of the table like a line of infantry, with Henry at the end, in his evening coat, at fourteen, looking like a young man of twenty. And on the other side, in an unbroken phalanx of pink, sat the Robert Ferrarses; the gentleman in plum, who had discovered that the mutton was capital; his wife, in lilac, who was smiling upon everyone with a warmth that seemed to have been calculated to the last degree; and the three young ladies, in pelisses, who were, at intervals, engaged in giving one another quick, silent, secret looks, like fencers.

It was a very good dinner. It began with a soup, and progressed, through six removes, to a pudding; and it was in the middle of the pudding, when the general talk had risen to a comfortable roar, that Mrs. Jennings, who had been sitting at the head with her stick between her knees, tapped upon her glass with a spoon.

“Hush!” she cried. “Hush, Sir John; you may go on with the pheasant afterwards. Palmer, put down that paper. Charlotte, stop giggling. I am going to make a speech.”

There was a general laugh. It was well known to her family that Mrs. Jennings was accustomed, upon the least pretext, to make a speech; that they were, as a rule, quite unpredictable; and that the best of them had been made, in the year of the Coronation, at births and weddings alike, and upon the subject of a pig.

“I am seventy-nine,” said Mrs. Jennings. “I have talked a great deal all my life, and I have put my foot into a great many places; and there is a very great deal that I have said that I should like, now, to take back. But there is one thing that I have never been sorry for, and that is that I did not mind my own business many years ago.”

She paused. The whole of the table was silent.

“It was in the autumn,” said Mrs. Jennings, “of the year eleven. I had two married daughters, and I was looking for somebody to be kind to. And I found, in a very small cottage on the edge of Sir John’s park, a family of ladies that had been turned out of their house, and were sitting in the parlour, in the rain, with a great many boxes; and I said to myself, Well, here is something to do. I was very officious. I was extremely tiresome. I asked a great many questions; and I said, to anybody who would listen, that the eldest Miss Dashwood was in love with a man whose name began with an F.”

“Mamma,” said Charlotte, in a strangled voice.

“I did. I had it on the very best authority, which was my own. And I was told, in the most decided manner, that I was wrong.” She turned upon Elinor, who was sitting at the far side, very upright, with the corners of her mouth quite firmly controlled. “I was not wrong. It was an F. It was the F that he had at the end of his name. It was only that, for all of six weeks, I never so much as guessed at the E. I looked for an F upon every gentleman that came up the drive. I never once saw an E, though it was standing in front of me the whole time, but not yet with a hymn-book in its hand.” She lifted her glass. “I have asked myself a great many times, Mr. Ferrars, how I could have missed you. And I have concluded that it was because you were the only man in the West of England who was entirely unremarkable and altogether right.”

“Mrs. Jennings —” said Edward, going scarlet.

“Do not interrupt. I have only just begun.” She waved her stick. “I say this because I have been looking at you all, tonight, and it seems to me that it has all turned out in a most remarkable manner. I planned to have Marianne married to the Colonel, and she was; I planned to have Elinor married to an F, and she was, and I got the letter wrong; and I do not think that I have ever in my life been so happy to be mistaken. I have watched you, all of you with your children and your baskets, and your tea-things, and your dreadful pony; I have watched you all and I want to say, before the whole of my family, that there has not been a house in this neighbourhood since I was a girl that has brought so much joy to the people about it.” She stopped. Her voice, in the silence, wavered a very little. “That is all. I am an old woman, and you may drink to it. I give you the Dashwoods, and all their little Dashwoods; and God bless every one of them.”

They drank it. It was done standing, in a great rustle of silk, with a good deal of scraping of chairs; there were cries of hear, hear, and bravo, and the Dashwoods; and at the far side of the table, where the Ferrars sat, the whole of the party had risen with one movement, and lifted their glasses, with exactly the same smile.

Mrs. Robert Ferrars had tears in her eyes. She dabbed them with a pocket-handkerchief.

The ladies withdrew at ten.

It was the custom, and it had been the custom for forty years, that the gentlemen should be left over their wine for precisely twenty minutes; and it was in the great pale drawing-room, hung with yellow satin, that Mrs. Jennings, upon a large sofa, having disposed her skirts, and seen the cups and the candles arranged, and the young persons dispatched to the far end of the room to look at some engravings, and Charlotte, who was a great deal too fond of her mother to be trusted with a secret, sent out to see about the coffee, beckoned, with a crooked forefinger, to Elinor and Marianne.

“Sit down,” said Mrs. Jennings. “There. Both of you. Close. My hearing is not what it was, and I do not wish to shout.”

They sat. It was curious, Marianne thought, to see, upon the old round face, an expression which she had never seen there: a look of great gravity, almost of stern purpose.

“I am going to say a thing,” said Mrs. Jennings. “And I am going to say it plainly, because I am very old, and I have not time to be clever. It is about my cousin Lucy.”

Neither of them spoke.