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She had high animal spirits, and a sort of natural self-consequence, which the attentions of the officers, to whom her uncle’s good dinners and her own easy manners recommended her, had increased into assurance.

Lydia, played by Julia Sawalha in the classic BBC TV drama, is the youngest of the Bennet sisters and described as a “self-willed and careless” 15-year-old with “high animal spirits, and a sort of natural self-consequence, which the attention of officers, to whom her uncle’s good dinners, and her own easy manners recommended her, had increased into assurance”.

People hobbled out on crutches and quitted sick-beds to say how "glad they were;" mere acquaintances most of them, who felt a strange mysterious sort of self-consequence in fancying themselves for the moment the friends of Peter Barrington, the millionnaire!

To judge of our jealousy, our sensibility, our high notions of responsibility, on this score, only consider if a single individual lets fall a solitary remark implying a doubt of the wit, the sense, the courage of a friend—how it staggers us—how it makes us shake with fear—how it makes us call up all our eloquence and airs of self-consequence in his defence, lest our partiality should be supposed to have blinded our perceptions, and we should be regarded as the dupes of a mistaken admiration.

Besides, she was a sharp and quizzical old thing, and from the height of her own self-consequence she stole glances at him that were a nice mingling of caution and truculence.