Free A Walk with Jane Austen by Lori Smith

out from exhaustion.
    Walking back, I said to Jack, “I'm not sure exactly what I said to you this morning, and I'm even less sure about what you heard.” He laughed a little. I was determined: “I just want to make sure I didn't communicate that I'm not interested, because I am.”
    “I appreciate that,” he said. And quietly, “No, I just heard you say that, you know, you were feeling emotional and needed some space.”
    “Good.”
    “You know, it's like I said,” he continued. “This other thing just started, and I didn't expect to meet someone—especially someone I had so much in common with. I'm sure you weren't expecting to meet anyone either.”
    “No, I wasn't.” I lied through my teeth. What's a girl to do?
    Back in the lobby, I practically whispered, “So then, I'm like, are we just hanging out or what? And I know I don't need an answer to that question now.”
    But Jack answered me anyway. “Yeah, we should view it that way and not feel like we need to sit together in lectures all the time or spend all our time together. You know, I just don't know what God's going to do with this.”
    I thought,
Yes, in some sense that's true, but doesn't it just come down to what Jack wants? Isn't that how God generally directs in these situations? And how could he want the girl in North Carolina instead of me?
    We sat in the common room with Spencer, laughing until about midnight when I went upstairs. Jack smiled at me when he said goodnight, said it was a nice night and he'd had a good time. It was.
    Officially, nothing is going on between Jack and me.
    Strangely, that feels remarkably good. And still, I am treasuring these days and these simple conversations.

    Perhaps I should make an effort not to see everyone else's faults so clearly. I love everyone close to me, and as for everyone else, I am naturally inclined rather not to like people, to just be content with my small group of lovely friends.
    All of my wash has gone slightly gray, and I'm afraid that I dropped underwear on the lawn and they will be pinned to the notice board in the morning. We were sitting outside for a couple of hours with a group, talking, waiting for the washing machines. I just wanted Jack to myself, but he was so incredibly happy to be with people.
    I think he is predisposed to love everyone he meets, to want to know everyone. He is like Bingley and Jane; he looks around and sees only good. I look around and catch ridiculous tendencies and sometimes am just too tired to put forth the effort not to be bored. I have been considering the character flaw to be his, but I suppose it must be my own.
    Biographers sometimes wrestle with Austen's complex character— the good Christian girl with the biting wit, with the ability to see and desire to expose the laughable and ludicrous. Most of the things that surprise them are in her letters to her sister, Cassandra, where (and perhaps the only place) she could freely say whatever she wanted.
    Maybe this doesn't surprise me because of my own experiences. My closest friends and I, if unquestionably faithful, are not overwhelmingly or unnaturally good—at least not blandly so. Our conversations range from incisive devotional thoughts to solving poverty to the creepy, ogling married guys buying us drinks downtown. It's no surprise to me that Jane's life encompassed both as well—that she had a capacity for devotion as well as an ability to wryly, if at times harshly, engage the world around her.
    She was not quick to love people outside her little circle, and that is a failing with which I can easily sympathize—one that, at some level, surely comes from some kind of insecurity. Oh well. It is much more fun to be annoyed with Jack and his determinedly loving everyone than to ponder my own failings.

    There is a woman who walks St. Aidâtes and the Folly Bridge at night. Seeing her for the second time, I notice how she mumbles and shuffles, rather well dressed for someone who may be crazy, in a