“I have been asking,” he said.
“No, I think you’ve been informing me.”
“You shouldn’t get stuck in the little details,” he said, “and it doesn’t really matter, anyway. I’m acting in your best interests.”
“Sure, but perhaps my opinion should be considered in my best interests, as well.”
“You find it difficult to let go of control,” he remarked.
“As do you,” she said. They had reached another one of those points in their arguments where there was just so winning. “Forget it, there’s no use in discussing it.”
There was another silence that fell between them.
“For what it is worth, I do not think the problem is the men I have been introducing you to.”
She looked at him. “No?”
“No,” he said. He was looking at the window. “The problem is that you walk into every room with your mind already made up and your manner already closed and any man with any sense can see immediately that you have absolutely no interest in being there, which is not exactly an invitation.” He paused. “You are entirely pleasant and entirely unreachable at the same time, and the men who approach you get the pleasant version and nothing else. It is no wonder they do not know what to make of you.”
She stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”
“Don’t take it as a criticism,” he said. “I am telling you what I observe.”
“You are telling me that it is my fault that the suitors have not worked out,” she said.
“If you chose to let anyone see the real version of you, the man who was paying attention would not need very much help from me,” he said, and turned to look at her properly. “You guard yourself and you probably do not notice you are doing it. But from the outside it is very visible.”
She looked at him, stunned.
“Furthermore,” he said, and his voice had changed again, quieter now, “you could have your pick of any man in that room if you simply allowed yourself to be seen properly. You are the most beautiful woman in any room you walk into and if you ever chose to actually make use of that fact instead of walking around as though you are entirely indifferent to your own effect on people, you would have no difficulty at all and you certainly would not need me to find Lord Pemberton for you.”
A silence fell in the carriage as she tried to wrap her mind around what he had just said to her.
The heat in her face arrived without any permission from her whatsoever, which she found both inconvenient and deeply annoying, and she turned to look at her own window.
“You do not mean that,” she said at last, though there was less certainty in it now than she would have preferred. “Or at least, you cannot possibly mean it in the way you have said it, because that would suggest you have been paying a degree of attention that is unnecessary.”
“I am allowed my opinion.”
“And you believe,” she said, “that you have understood me so completely that you may explain my own behavior to me as though I have simply failed to notice it myself? Your observation, however well intentioned, is not as straightforward as you appear to believe.”
“Then explain it,” he said.
“When you say that I could have my pick of any man in the room, you say it as though it is simply a matter of deciding to, as though the men in that room are a reasonable selection of options and I simply need to apply myself more diligently. Most of them are perfectly adequate, none of them are…”
She stopped herself, halfway.
“None of them are what?” he said.
She looked at the window.
“It does not matter,” she said.
“Suit yourself,” he let the matter drop.
But what she really wanted to say was,none of them are you.
The next morning after breakfast, Joseph approached her.
