It also made the present company feel unbearable.
They had just begun to move toward the dining room when Owen’s attention, which had been only half engaged by Miss Annesley’s remarks on Almack’s and entirely exhausted by his mother’s management of him, was abruptly caught and held elsewhere.
Harrow, who a moment before had been at his elbow, was no longer beside him. Owen glanced across the room and saw him standing near the far side of the fireplace, talking with animation to a young lady in white muslin and pale blue trimming.
It was the same girl Harrow had danced with twice the previous evening. Owen paused in spite of himself. He had not expectedto see her there. Indeed, until that instant, he had not known he had expected anything at all. Yet the sight of her stirred at once another thought, swifter and more unreasonable than he liked: if this young lady was present, then perhaps her chaperone was, too.
His spirits, which had been sinking steadily for the greater part of the evening, lifted with disconcerting ease.
He told himself it was only curiosity. Still, he looked around the room with more interest than he had yet shown it.
And then he saw her.
She was seated a little farther down the room among a cluster of ladies whose gowns appeared to have been designed in competition with tropical birds. Feathers nodded above elaborately dressed heads, while ribbons, bright silks, and jewels caught the candlelight at every turn. The whole group glittered and fluttered so industriously that any quieter woman among them ought to have vanished entirely.
She did not. If anything, she stood out the more for her restraint.
Her gown was elegant but plain beside the others. Her hair was dressed without excess, and her whole appearance was marked by a simplicity that should have made her easy to overlook and somehow had the opposite effect. There was no display abouther and no attempt to dazzle, yet the absence of artifice made her more striking than the women around her.
She looked as though she belonged to herself in a way the others did not.
Practical, he thought. And beautiful.
The word arrived before he could help it, and with a degree of certainty he found inconvenient. She was not beautiful in the loud, triumphant style so many women cultivated, but in a manner infinitely more dangerous to a man’s peace: calm, composed, and impossible to dismiss after once being noticed.
As if she felt his gaze, she looked up. For one brief moment, their eyes met across the room.
She gave the smallest inclination of her head, which was barely more than an acknowledgement, then turned away to answer something said by the lady beside her.
But the effect of that slight recognition remained absurdly strong.
It was, Owen thought, like being singled out in a crowd without any public notice being made of it. He had spent the whole evening surrounded, addressed, admired, and managed, andnone of it had made him feel so distinctly seen as that single measured glance.
He sat down at the table more attentive than he had been all night. His mother was placed beside him, which under ordinary circumstances would have been only a trial. That evening, it presented an opportunity. The covers had scarcely been removed before he leaned the smallest degree toward her.
“Mother, who is the lady in gray silk, three places beyond Lady Mortimer? The one seated between the woman in orange feathers and the girl in lilac.”
His mother followed his gaze, and the instant she identified the object of his inquiry, her expression altered in a way Owen did not much care for.
“That?” she replied, with quiet dismissal. “She is nobody for you to concern yourself with.”
He kept his eyes on his plate. “A severe judgment, when I asked only for a name.”
“You asked enough.”
He waited, because he knew that his mother would elaborate, because she could never bear a silence when she felt herself inpossession of superior information. However, she did lower her voice when she continued.
“Her father is dead. Her mother has long been an outcast. There was some very disagreeable business years ago, accusations, impropriety, scandal, I hardly remember the particulars. The whole family is under a cloud. No one sensible would wish to be connected with them.”
Owen’s hand stilled very slightly upon his glass.
He looked again, though not so directly as before. The woman in question was listening with composed politeness to one of her neighbors, yet there was something in her expression which suggested she was enduring rather than enjoying the exchange.
“Is that so?” he inquired.
“It is,” his mother confirmed, turning to face him fully. “And now, I need you to stop wasting another thought on a woman like her.”
His mother’s tone made it plain she considered the matter settled. Then, because she could never rest content with one dismissal when two might be given, she added. “And in any case, she looks exactly what she must be: quiet, dull, and entirely without consequence. I cannot imagine what made you notice her.”
