Asked for a subject, Mr. Collins only ever needs one. This episode is the complete audiobook of Chapter 14 of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, an after-dinner evening in which the rector of Hunsford unpacks the full glory of his patroness for a host who cannot get enough of him.

Mr. Bennet plays his cousin like an instrument, inviting ever more detail about Lady Catherine de Bourgh: her affability, her condescension, her advice that he marry as soon as he can, and the delicate little compliments Mr. Collins composes in advance while trying to give them as unstudied an air as possible. Mr. Bennet concludes the man is as absurd as he had hoped, and shares his enjoyment only by an occasional glance at Elizabeth.

• Lady Catherine, Collins reports, has never treated him with the contempt his humility invites; she has even asked him twice to dine at Rosings and counselled him to choose a wife with discretion.
• Miss de Bourgh, sickly and small, is to Mr. Collins most charming, and he has assured her mother that her health, sadly, deprives the British court of its brightest ornament.
• Invited to read aloud to the ladies, Collins recoils from a novel and selects Fordyce’s Sermons; three pages in, Lydia interrupts with militia gossip, and the reading is over for good.
• Wounded, he abandons books for backgammon with Mr. Bennet, observing that he has often noticed how little young ladies are interested in books of a serious stamp.