The journey home ends at an inn where the welcome party has been shopping. This episode is the complete audiobook of Chapter 39 of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, in which Kitty and Lydia meet their sisters with a table of cold meat, a hideous new bonnet, and the news that will shape the rest of the novel.

Lydia is in the highest spirits: she has treated everyone to lunch, though the others must lend her the money, since hers went on the bonnet, which she does not even think very pretty. Then the real intelligence tumbles out. The regiment leaves Meryton in a fortnight, bound for a summer camp at Brighton, and Lydia’s every thought bends toward following it there.

• The bonnet is defended on impeccable logic: there were two or three much uglier in the shop, and it hardly signifies what one wears this summer once the regiment is gone.
• Mary King is safe from Wickham and Wickham safe from Mary King: she is gone to her uncle at Liverpool, fortune and all, and Lydia pronounces her a great fool for going.
• Lydia unveils the family scheme she is promoting: a summer at Brighton for everybody, which Elizabeth privately marks as the last thing on earth to wish for.
• The carriage ride home is wall-to-wall Lydia, talk and laughter and lottery losses, and at Longbourn Mrs. Bennet rejoices to find Jane as handsome as ever.