“Oh.” His head touched the back of his chair as he considered the question, staring at the ceiling in reflection. “Perhaps I am a bit less…exacting than once I was. Less rigid. More flexible.”
“Would you qualify that as good or bad?” Grace asked, propping one fist beneath her chin as she leaned against the side of the couch.
A wry smile touched the corner of his lips. “I’m not certain,” he said. “I’ve done some things of late which are of questionable morality on the surface, and instigated still more that the law would find beyond the pale. It’s been at least twenty years since I last walked anything but a scrupulously narrow path, so I do find my conscience somewhat plagued by these things.”
He did rather seem the sort to adhere to a certain moral rigidity. “What was the last thing you did which plagued your conscience?” she asked, curious. “Prior to all of this.”
A small shrug of his shoulders. “I broke a boy’s nose in a fight,” he admitted.
“You?” A little laugh eked from her throat. “I truly cannotimagine it. Why?”
“He said disparaging things about my mother.”
“Oh.” Now it was her turn to be abashed. “Henry, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s been decades,” he said, “since I last got into scrapes such as those. I don’t regret them, really. But Mother worried for me, and eventually I grew up enough to realize that it would do me no favors. I couldn’t convince anyone of anything with my fists. I could only show them with my actions. So I have always tried.”
“Tried?”
“Tried to be better. The best. The sort of man—the sort ofearl—who would repair the family reputation.” He said it like he was reciting a mantra, like an ingrained, reflexive chant that had lived within his head for years, whispering at the back of his mind.
Doing all the right things. Saying all the right things. Constraining himself to walking only the finest of lines, the narrowest of paths. Pursuing the unreachable goal of perfection. “Henry,” Grace asked softly. “Do you…like yourself?”
He startled to the question, staring at her as if she’d spoken to him in a language he didn’t understand. “Likemyself? Why would I need to like myself?”
“Because it’s important to like oneself. I do,” she said. “If you were to hear theTontalk of me, you’d think me beyond redemption. But I never mind them, because I do like myself.” A reflective smile caught at the corners of her lips. “I was nearly engaged last year,” she said softly.
“Engaged?” Some strange emotion kindled within the frosty blue of his eyes. Something a shade away from anger. Jealousy? “To whom?”
“Lord Latimer.” It seemed so silly, now, that she had allowed herself to come so close to such a disaster. “I liked him, in the beginning,” she said. “He was pleasant, affable. I don’t think Iever loved him, but I enjoyed his company. In the beginning, at least.”
Henry’s hands flexed, curling over the arms of his chair. “What happened with him?”
“I wasn’t enough for him,” she said. “No—no, that’s not quite it. I wastoo muchfor him. Too loud, too demonstrative, too opinionated. There was too much of me all around. Suddenly he was trying to prune bits of me away, a piece at a time, like a flower that had bloomed too wild. Suddenly I was a jewel that required polishing to achieve his version of what I ought to be. Everything I like best about myself became a flaw to remove. He wanted me to mute myself, to blunt myself, to dull myself. Even to adopt a slimming regimen, so that there might be less of me all around.”
“That unmitigatedarse,” Henry hissed through the tight clench of his teeth, and Grace found herself once more reminded that hehad never considered the fullness of her figure a flaw in need of alteration. “Someone ought to put him in his place.”
Grace allowed herself a snicker. “Oh, I did,” she assured him. “I refused him in the end, and not particularly kindly. Because I like myself just as I am, and it is only his loss if he couldn’t.” A little sigh slipped across her lips. “There are many people who likely dislike me for the wrong reasons. But I like myself for the right ones.” Because she was kind and clever, witty and loyal. Because she knew how to lift spirits, and how to encourage without nagging. Because she was good-humored and—mostly—sweet-tempered. Because she was compassionate and thoughtful. “It’s important to like oneself,” she said. “Because one must alsolivewith oneself.”
A long, contemplative silence drew out between them as he discarded another letter and scratched down a new number upon their tally sheet. “I don’t think I used to like myself,” hesaid quietly as he set down his pen again. “But I think—I think now I do. At least a little better than I did.”
∞∞∞
“You can’t watch the door all evening,” Felicity chided lightly as she sidled up on Grace’s left side. “Perhaps he’s not coming.”
Grace offered a sheepish smile. “He said he would,” she said. And really—that had been enough. For some reason, that had beenenoughto keep her eyes pinned to the ballroom doors throughout the bulk of the evening. Enough that she’d hardly managed to make even those vague, polite sounds which might have signified some manner of attention to the prattling-on of her dance partners.
Enough that she’d saved him a dance, which she had never been moved to do before.
“Ah, well,” Felicity said on a sigh. “I suppose something must have come up, then. And haven’t you spent a great deal of time together just lately, anyway?”
Yes, but—not as much as Grace would have liked. “We don’t attendallof the same events, you know,” she said.
“Perhaps not,” Felicity said. “But he has come to call every day.”
“Is that a problem?”
“No, not as such. It’s just that we have got two visiting days each week, and he’s far surpassed them.” Felicity shook her head in exasperation. “How long ago was it that the two of you were at one another’s throats?”
