Chapter 54: Much Ado On the Inside
After Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy leave, Elizabeth wonders pretty much the same thing Skep already asked, which was "why did Mr. Darcy even bother showing up last chapter if he wasn't going to freaking do anything?"
Still, the boys finally accept Mrs. Bennet's dinner invitation and come back around the following week. Even though Jane starts out the chapter trying to convince Elizabeth that she plans to interact with Mr. Bingley as a perfectly good friend and nothing more, you know and I know and Elizabeth knows that that's pretty much not going to happen. And it doesn't; it's pretty much all over as soon as he walks in and sits down next to her at the dinner table.
But beyond this point we don't really know what's going on between these two, because this chapter is from Elizabeth's perspective and she spends the ENTIRE night fretting over Mr. Darcy. Within the space of sentences she's jumping from "If he doesn't come say hi I'm never talking to him again" to "I rejected him! Why in the world would he give me any more of his time than he has to?" to "UGH you're playing cards with my mother instead of me, I hope you're so distracted by how lame you're being that you lose."
She gets no satisfaction. But Jane does. And by that I mean, when all's said and done and the night is over, Jane expresses to Elizabeth how proud she feels that she handled Mr. Bingley with the exact amount of level-headedness that she'd expected for herself.
Elizabeth just about hits her across the face with a pillow for being a dolt.