You can't? I think it is entirely believable.
Posted by Mark on November 28, 1997 at 17:59:46:
In response to It would explain..., written by Constanza on November 28, 1997 at 16:22:13
] On the other hand, I simply cannot imagine Darcy actually invinting her to dance!!!!
Darcy is trying to become more intimate with Elizabeth. Caroline is playing a lively tune just right for a reel. A reel is a "non-mating" dance. You dance it to have fun, the partner is not as important as in other dances. (Who can converse while dancing a polka, after all.) So it is non-threating.
Put yourself in poor Darcy's shoes. Here is a girl you find bewitching. She's not bad looking. (He said she was tolerable, after all; nothing about being a toad!) She is extremely bright and witty. In every conversation they have she toys with him, but she does it without putting on airs -- "neither of us perform to strangers." This is extremely alluring to him.
Lately when he chats with her, he finds that even though conversations begin as a group, they end up conversing only with themselves. Everybody else kind of fades into the background leaving themselves to converse alone.
He is being drawn inexorably to her, like a moth to a flame. Asking her to dance a reel is precisely in character.
When she rejects his advances, he retreats a little. But she keeps up the non-verbal "come here" signals. Witness their parallel conversation the next night, "And your defect is a propensity to hate every body." "And yours is wilfully to misunderstand them." And once again they talk and ignore everybody else in the room.
Poor Darcy doesn't know what to do. This woman is driving him mad! So he resolves to have nothing to do with her.
So I think asking her to dance the reel is emtirely in character, though not in the character that Lizzy has decided he is.
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