You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at least.

More from Pride and Prejudice

• For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?
• It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
• Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.
• Undoubtedly ... there is a meanness in all the arts which ladies sometimes condescend to employ for captivation. What bears affinity to cunning is despicable.
• Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.
• A man would always wish to give a woman a better home than the one he takes her from; and he who can do it, where there is no doubt of her regard, must, I think, be the happiest of mortals.