Kitty Read Online Free PDF Page B

women survived their spouses in great numbers.
    The sound of a waltz drifted tantalizingly on the air as Kitty and her two formidable chaperones walked up the red carpet on the pavement, past the policeman on duty, and into the entrance hall. After leaving their cloaks, they mounted to the ballroom on the first floor. As they were late, their hostess had already joined the dance.
    Kitty stood at the entrance watching the chattering, glittering, circling throng and tried to remember that they were only human beings. Various young men who all looked bewilderingly alike in black and white evening dress, white gloves and patent leather hair, wrote their names in her dance card. She stumbled her way dutifully round the dance floor, bewildered by the strange speech. Everything was “cheery” or “ripping,” words she had not heard before. Finally, she was left to sit beside her mother. Then Lady Henley sailed up. “I must introduce you to a very good connection, Mrs. H—I mean, Euphemia.” With a look in her eyes like a hunter closing in on his prey, Mrs. Harrison got to her feet with a protesting creak from her stays, and followed her massive friend.
    Kitty sat on that uncomfortable piece of furniture called a rout chair and felt wretched. All the young people glittered and laughed and chatted around her as if she did not exist She stared across the room and, for the second time, found herself looking straight into the eyes of Lord Peter Chesworth. He made every other man in the room look shoddy and insipid and very young. He moved slightly as if to cross to her side, but was waylaid by a dazzlingly smart lady dressed in scarlet chiffon. Long ruby earrings fell like drops of blood from her exquisite little ears and her black hair was piled on top of her head in glossy curls. Her eyes, which were of a light, clear blue with black lines round the irises, were gazing up at Lord Chesworth in an intimate and tantalizing way. He took her arm and led her into the dance where she swayed against him, her tiny feet barely touching the floor.
    The tiny spark of hope that the evening would turn out to be anything other than depressing, died in Kitty’s heart as she watched them. She had spent her lonely hours building the Baron into a dream-lover because she had no other man to think of. She had heard that he was unmarried. She had never considered that he would be attracted to anyone else. But there was worse to come.
    “Have you met the new heiress, Kitty Harrison?” The voice seemed to be almost in her ear and she jumped. Leaning back in her chair, she realized that one of her dancing partners was on the other side of the pillar with a friend.
    “Gawd, yes. Pretty little thing but she jumps all over one’s feet and says ‘beg pardon, beg pardon’ the whole time, just like a bloody scullery maid.”
    His friend whispered something and the dancing partner popped his head around the pillar, saw Kitty, gave her a cheeky, unrepentant grin and moved off arm in arm with the other man.
    Kitty sat on in misery, staring at the toe of her dancing slipper. What was wrong with saying “beg pardon”? At Miss Bates’s seminary it had been considered a very polite and ladylike thing to say.
    The guests continued to circle under the orange glare of the recently installed electric lights. Not a very grand ball. At grand balls they used masses of candles, thought poor Kitty viciously, sitting surrounded by other wallflowers and the heavy scent of gardenias and wishing she were dead. No, that was not true. She wished
them
all dead first.
    A shadow fell across her white dress and she looked up. Lord Chesworth was standing before her, flanked on either side by Lady Henley and Mrs. Harrison. He looked like a man who had just been arrested.
    “May I have this dance, Miss Harrison?”
    How Kitty longed for the courage to say “no,” rather than dance with a man who had obviously been coerced into it by her stern chaperones. She merely bowed her