Thanks Christopher and I agree. Thanks for pointing this out. I did not quite wrap my brain around it correctly. Col Fitzwilliam’s saying it jokingly makes more sense to me now and also Lizzy’s seeing it as a boast. (:D) I have to add however that the gentlemen’s conduct does not suit my feelings. Darcy informed his cousin what he had done on the trip to Rosings and when he finds Lizzy is there does not give the man a heads-up she is acquainted with the lady of his triumph? He could warn him without using names. Perhaps Darcy did not expect Col Fitzwilliam to gossip about it:

“It is a circumstance which Darcy, of course, would not wish to be generally known, because if it were to get round to the lady's family it would be an unpleasant thing.” (33)

Indeed! I think the colonel is not thinking very handily. He tells Lizzy he only suspects it was Bingley because “believing him the kind of young man to get into a scrape of that sort, and from knowing them to have been together the whole of last summer” (33) which is a correct deduction but he must have also known that Darcy spent just over a month (*20 October to 27 November) at Bingley’s house in Hertfordshire where he met Lizzy. I guess Col Fitzwilliam thought Lizzy would enjoy the joke but is it a wise one to generally make to a lady who has questionable connections and at least one relation a sensible man would not congratulate himself for acquiring—Mr. Collins.

Could he have been unaware of Lizzy’s particular situation in life? I imagine Lady Catherine filled the gentlemen in on Mrs. Collins' guests when she ran out of other things to say. Lizzy, the entailment, her connections and all the other information she gathered through her impertinent quizzing in Ch. 29 might have been fodder for an odd moment or two. (:D)