A/N: Hello, all. I'm back with another one-shot focusing on another of the dear Bennet girls. This time, we're taking a trip into Mary's head. It's a bit of a silly and also depressing place, I warn you. This can be seen, I suppose, as a bit of a companion with "The Stuff of Novels", as it is another Bennet sister's musings on love, but it is not quite so centered on Elizabeth. Hopefully I presented a version of Mary true to your prior perceptions, and I so dearly hope that you enjoy. Read on!

Girls Like Mary Bennet

I do not like to dream.

I do not speak of dreaming in slumber; rather, I am referring to the dreams that happen during the day, when the mind is awake and aware—the silly fantasies that one can get so caught up in when there is little control over one's thoughts.

These fantasies used to occupy my mind quite frequently, as a child. But now I spend my time in much more sensible and productive ways.

Besides, after years and years of disappointed hopes, dreaming has ceased to be very entertaining at all anymore.

As I said, I do not like to dream.

When I was a young teen, I would pass hours in my own head, convinced, for a little while, that I was off with some dashing young man who told me that I had beauty to rival Jane's and charisma to rival Elizabeth's. He would be extremely wealthy and handsome, to be sure, and I would be the envy of all of Hertfordshire.

As the years passed, my dreams became more sensible. The man wasn't dashing, anymore, but rather homely instead. He was middle-class, someone that I could actually attain. And no longer did I have beauty and charisma to rival my older sister's; rather, he called me intelligent and well-mannered.

And now I am no longer young and no longer silly and I do not dream at all anymore. It is best, I think, to not make oneself too aware of possibilities so as to not increase disappointment when none of them come true.

However, there was recently, I admit, a small period of time when I allowed myself to dream once again.

My cousin, Mr. William Collins, came to stay with us for a while about one year ago. He came with the intent of choosing a wife among my sisters and me, and I had hopes, for a while, that I might be the one he would choose.

And before you begin to laugh at the idea of a man choosing me over my sisters, let me inform you a bit on the type of man that Mr. Collins happens to be.

Mr. Collins is well-read. He is adorably awkward around other people and quite blind to social correctness—although he has perfect manners, he is so very unaware, sometimes, of how he is perceived. Mr. Collins values propriety and he values women with morals. He takes pleasure in complimenting others with genuine niceties.

I did not think, originally, that Mr. Collins would jump at shy, beautiful, and unaccomplished Jane.

I was convinced that he would not opt for Kitty or Lydia.

And I did not think that he would choose Elizabeth, with her sharp tongue, pretty face, and air of confidence quite inappropriate in a proper lady.

I was wrong on the first and last accounts. He did opt for Jane. And then he switched, as Mama told me later, his attentions to Elizabeth after he was told that Jane was already being courted.

And that was the day that I lost faith in humankind.

You may accuse me of hyperbole, but I assure you that I am quite serious. If anyone, I was sure, could look past beauty and sexual desires, it would be William Collins.

But no. He chose Jane for her beauty.

And one cannot say that he saw something deeper in her, for after she was proved to be unavailable, he moved on to Elizabeth, clearly the next in terms of beauty.

Mr. Collins, clergyman, honorable as a man can be, did not look twice at the most accomplished, morally clean, and religiously pure of all of the Bennet girls. He went for the most attractive two.

I do not harbor a great deal of animosity towards the man; he is among the best.

I have merely, in this endeavor, lost respect for humanity as a whole. Can we not see the beauty in things other than….well, beauty?

In three days, my two older sisters are marrying men straight from my childhood dreams, the handsome and wealthy ones that I long ago dismissed as existing merely in novels.

Now I know that this is not true. They exist in reality, also, but only for those that resemble the heroines in novels.

Has anyone besides myself ever realized that heroines are always either beautiful, charismatic, or both?

You will never find a Mary Bennet at the center of a great love story.

And if you did, she would be different than me.

She wouldn't be ugly—she would be plain.

She wouldn't be unsociable—she would be timid.

She wouldn't be worthless—she would be undiscovered.

Where has all of the ugliness gone? Life is not quite so happy.

Well, it is, I suppose, for girls like Elizabeth and Jane, with beauty and social skills and now money and the world at their feet.

Girls like Mary Bennet can only dream.

And I don't like to dream.

Not anymore.