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Columbia Lady with me.”
    “Of course not,” Julienne said, rising. “Shall we go, then?”
    Magically Tyla appeared with Julienne’s shawl. Her new ensemble was indeed stunning. Her blue satin dress shimmered richly, her over-the-elbow white gloves were spotless (as Tyla had been able to completely remove Carley’s licorice smudge), her hair was dressed perfectly, complimented by the gold tiara and gold-and-pearl earrings, and she had ordered a lavish cashmere shawl, dyed the same azure blue as the dress, with a twenty-two-inch-long silk fringe. The blue brought out the golden highlights of her hair, and made her eyes dark and mysterious. Archie Leggett’s compliments had been both right and wrong; she was an extraordinarily beautiful woman, but her slender height, her erect carriage, and her athletic grace was much more mindful of Charles Ashby than Roseann’s fragile prettiness.
    Archie offered her his arm and escorted her to the waiting five-glassed landau. The day had been cold and clear, and the previous day’s blanket of radiant snow had remained. The night sky seemed to mirror the frost-spangled earth, with millions of stars twinkling cheerfully. Julienne inhaled deeply. Though the air was freezing, she loved the exhilaration of cold weather when there was such a spectacular snowfall. It was unusual for a city in the Deep South. “Oh, don’t you just love snow?” she asked as Archie handed her into the carriage.
    “It makes such a mess in the streets, it’s quite an inconvenience,” he replied.
    Wryly Julienne thought that his answer was so typical of the man. Then again, she had been extremely surprised that Archie had apparently asked her father if he could escort Julienne alone. It was a measure of impropriety that she never would have expected from Archie. In fact, he had objected to Julienne going to the Moak’s revelry, but when he found out that she had persuaded her father to allow her to attend, he agreed to go with them.
    Archie went to the other side of the carriage and started to climb in, but he hesitated halfway inside. “I wouldn’t want to muss your dress, Miss Ashby,” he said.
    Reflecting that Archie was so timid that he wouldn’t even dare to gently push aside the folds of her skirt, she pulled the wide hoop skirt closer around her. “Get in, Archie, you couldn’t ruin this wonderful dress if you were trying to.”
    He climbed in, timidly stepping to avoid the hem of the skirt, seated himself across from her, then knocked on the window behind him, a signal for them to go. The carriage started down the long drive.
    Delighted, Julienne stared out the wide window at the snowbound landscape outside. The Ashbys had two carriages but both were sturdy barouches, with shutters to keep out the weather. A glassed carriage was a luxury indeed. The Leggett family was very wealthy. “Just beautiful,” she murmured quietly.
    “Yes, you are,” Archie said, staring at her. Then, to Julienne’s shock, he jumped up, trod on her dress, threw himself on the seat beside her, and grabbed her right hand. Clutching it with both of his, he said with an uncharacteristic warmth, “Miss Ashby, I mean, Julienne. You must know how I feel about you. I’ve been calling on you for a year now, you must know how much I esteem you. Will you allow me to speak to your father?”
    “What? Speak to my father?” Julienne repeated in a slight daze. “Archie, you are the only man I know that can take every hint of romance out of a marriage proposal!”
    “What? What do you mean?” he asked blankly.
    Julienne took a long deep breath and gently drew her hand out of his grasp. “Archie, you are a very nice man. But this is not at all how I envisioned that a man who is deeply in love with me would ask me to marry him.”
    His eyebrows went up in surprise, but then his face settled into a look that Julienne knew very well. It was an expression of condescension, of conscious superiority, that he always assumed