“‘Your examination of Mr. Darcy is over, I presume?’ said Miss Bingley, ‘and pray what is the result?’ “‘I am perfectly convinced by it that Mr. Darcy has no defect. He owns it himself without disguise.’ “‘No,’ said Darcy, ‘I have made no such pretension. I have faults enough, but they are not, I hope, of understanding. My temper I dare not vouch for. It is, I believe, too little yielding; certainly too little for the convenience of the world. I cannot forget the follies and vices of others so soon as I ought, nor their offences against myself. My feelings are not puffed about with every attempt to move them. My temper would perhaps be called resentful. My good opinion once lost is lost for ever.’ “‘_That_ is a failing indeed,’ cried Elizabeth. ‘Implacable resentment _is_ a shade in a character. But you have chosen your fault well. I really cannot _laugh_ at it. You are safe from me.’ “‘There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.’ “‘And _your_ defect is a propensity to hate everybody.’ “‘And yours,’ he replied with a smile, ‘is wilfully to misunderstand them.’” Darcy, by the way, is one of the least attractive of the principal men characters. It is inconceivable that any man with the remotest pretension to gentlemanly feeling should say, even to himself, much less aloud in a ball-room, on having his attention called to a young girl sitting out: “‘Which do you mean?’ and, turning round, he looked for a moment at Elizabeth, till, catching her eye, he withdrew his own, and coldly said,—’She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men.’” Indeed, Darcy’s whole character is so averse from anything usually associated with the word gentleman, that one wonders where Miss Austen found her prototype. Possibly he was one of the few characters for which she drew entirely on her imagination. In saying this there is no innuendo that in other cases she drew straight from the life; it is, I believe, very few novelists who ever wish to do such a thing, but it is certainly true, and everyone who has attempted fiction knows it, that nearly every character in a life-like book has some prototype in real life, some man or woman who gave the first indication of a certain character; the personality may be altered entirely, it may be only one small quality which is derived from the prototype, but it is nevertheless that person who brought that particular character into existence. So far as we know there was no haughty, self-satisfied man of the world in Jane Austen’s list of acquaintances.