“Of course, I’m twenty-four, Alice is just eighteen. Of course, it’s your twentieth.”
“A significant age.”
“No, surely that must be twenty-one. When you are in your majority.”
“Some people have said twenty is quite an old age for a woman.”
“Nonsense, you are as young and sprightly as ever. And unlike me, you still have all your hair. Didn’t you walk the whole way over here?”
“Yes.”
“And it made your cheeks so pink from the cold. Be sure to get near the fire and get warmed up.”
“Some people think a woman should be married by twenty.”
“I don’t know who thesesome peopleare that you keep quoting, but they’re wrong. You’ve only had one Season, Phee. You must look around a bit, take your time to find the right chap, all that.”
“Maybe I’ve already found him.”
His eyes narrowed. She had a moment when she thought her timid bravery might be rewarded.
“Do I know him? Has he asked for you?”
“Not in so many words.”
“Well, I hope he’s good enough for my Bumblephee. You must let me meet him.”
She sat down abruptly, her legs suddenly too weak to hold her up. “Yes.”
She forced herself to stay and to play a game. George said it helped him and she had just promised to help him, hadn’t she? But she felt so heavy. So very heavy.
He won. He did not comment on her poor play, perhaps feeling he had chastised her enough for one day.
“Congratulations, George. It’s a little wet out. May I use your carriage to go home?”
“You won’t stay and have tea with me and Alice?”
“No, not today.”
She rode home alone in his carriage and did very well at dinner that night with her parents and Andrew and Daniel home from his regiment for Christmastide.
Before she went to bed, she sat at her dressing table, shivering, and looked at herself in the mirror.
She did not think of herself as stubborn. She thought of herself as pliable. Too easily influenced by others. Too wanting to please. Not at all like George and Alice, those Danforths who knew what they wanted and took it. Alice, with her confident wildness. George, with his rigid certainty.
But her mother had said Phoebe was stubborn. In the worst kind of way, she had said. It had come up when Phoebe had refused to debut when she was seventeen. Then her mother had asked her, “What is your perpetual lateness, your nail-biting, your chess-playing, if not stubbornness?”
So Phoebe would now think of herself as stubborn. No, not stubborn. Resolute. Disciplined, like George. No, not like George. Like her brother Andrew, who would not give up his violin despite being heir to the duchy.
But unlike Andrew, she would use her resolve in order to give up. She would give up George.
She wanted to be important in someone’s life. A wife, a mother. George would never give her that.
And she could do this. She knew she could.
She toyed with the idea of giving up chess with him as well. But, no. She still must selfishly see him. And chess was the only thing he wanted from her. It was the only thing she could give him. And she still wanted to give him something.
She was still going to love him. Yes, like a brother. She just wasn’t going tolovehim. And if that proved impossible, at the very least, she wasn’t going to wait for him to love her back. Not anymore.
