Chapter 55: Much Ado In Some Other Room, Let's Go Girls
Mr. Bingley keeps dropping by the Bennet household, where's it's soon revealed that Mr. Darcy needed to go to London for ten days.
Apparently this means something to Mrs. Bennet, because when Mr. Bingley visits hereafter, she makes excuses to shuffle herself and her other daughters out of the room in the evenings so that he and Jane can be alone. Elizabeth is like, this obvious shit is so obvious it's never going to work.
But when Elizabeth returns to the drawing-room the second time this happens, she catches Mr. Bingley and Jane in the scandalous act of standing close to each other next to the fireplace and saying things that the book describes as "intimate" but which Skep is willfully misinterpreting as "sexy". It's not explicitly stated what's going on at first, but it's pretty obvious what it means when Mr. Bingley runs off to go talk to Mr. Bennet and Jane leaves to go deliver some "good news" to her mother.
At long last, they're engaged to be married. Thank christ we can stop milking this limp, dried-up plot point.
The rest of the chapter is nothing but the family rejoicing, so I don't need to go into detail. But since I can't resist a good Mr. Bennet witticism, I have to draw attention to the line where he confirms to Jane that she and Bingley are such a good match, pointing out that because they're so easygoing they'll never be able to make a decision on anything; they're so trusting that every servant is going to rob them; and they're so generous that they'll end up going broke. It's cute, this is cute stuff.
And once again the Bennets are the talk of the town, although in this engagement, the news is much less mortifying.