The World Will Prey on Them

The holiday dies in the second of two letters from Jane: Lydia is gone from Brighton, Wickham has taken her, and nobody can say where. Sadie Stein softens none of it. She prices out what one runaway sister costs the other four, and gives Mr. Bennet his harshest hearing yet, the father whose one job was preventing this. Then she widens to the rules of the game: a world where women can scheme, arrange, and hope, but only men can act, and the most powerful man in the book prefers to act invisibly. Why would Wickham bother? Lydia brings him nothing, and Stein's answer is worse than villainy.