The Dreadful Debutante Read Online Free PDF Page B

marquess. “You dance very prettily,” he said.
     
    “Thank you, my lord,” replied Mira in an abstracted way. “You dance very prettily yourself.”
     
    “Now you are not to sit out and cast languishing looks at Lord Charles,” he said severely. “Try for a bit of dignity.”
     
    Mira gave a little sigh. “If only he would look at me the way he looks at Drusilla.”
     
    He experienced a stab of irritation. He had always been courted and feted. He was not used to spending time with any young female who was plainly sighing for someone else. On the other hand he was sorry for her. He would secure her for the supper dance, take her in to supper, demonstrate to the fashionable world that he found Miss Mira Markham charming, and then forget about her.
     
    And Mira would have remained relatively happy that evening had not Charles, after his dance with Drusilla, asked her to dance. It was the quadrille, something she usually danced very well, but his very presence distracted her so that she stumbled several times. It was like a poison seeping back into her blood, her longing for his attention. She hated the way the elegant figures of the dance separated them and made conversation impossible. When she promenaded with him at the end of the dance, she searched to reestablish the old camaraderie with him, but she noticed his eyes kept straying to where Drusilla was walking with
her
partner.
     
    He delivered her back to Mrs. Markham, and Mira sat down primly, back very straight, trying to look cheerful but feeling only loss and misery welling up in her.
     
    But where the great Marquess of Grantley led, others followed, and to Mira’s surprise a gentleman immediately approached and asked her for the next dance—and so it went on until the fact that she was demonstrating not only to Charles but to her father how popular she had become raised her spirits. She was intelligent enough to know the reason for her sudden popularity, and when the marquess secured her hand for another waltz, this time the supper one, she smiled up at him with open friendliness and said, “Thank you for restoring me to the good graces of society.”
     
    “You are welcome. Are you enjoying the ball?”
     
    “I would enjoy it better if Charles would stop pining after Drusilla.”
     
    “I will talk to you about this at supper.”
     
    Mrs. Markham looked at Mira in startled surprise as the marquess led her younger daughter into the supper room. Other mothers of hopefuls were congratulating her rather sourly on Mira’s “success.”
     
    “Now,” began the marquess severely, when Mira had been served with food and wine, “pay attention to me, and stop letting your eyes wander past my shoulder in case your beloved Charles should hove into view. It strikes me that the amiable Charles amused himself by being kind to a child. For some immature reason you expected that friendship to go on. But now you are a young woman and must put away childish dreams. You are not going to get your childhood companion back, no matter what happens. You should begin your bereavement now and stop wasting time hoping that he will pay attention to you. You probably do not even think of him as a woman thinks of a man. You do not dream of kisses but of days on the hunting field. So it should be easy for you to forget him. You are not in love.”
     
    “I am
deeply
in love,” protested Mira. “You cannot see inside my head.”
     
    “So are you going to ignore my advice and waste a whole Season not seeing any other man but the one who quite patently does not want you?”
     
    “There is still hope,” said Mira defiantly. “He danced with me. And Drusilla can be such a bore. She has no intelligent conversation.”
     
    “I haven’t heard a word of intelligent conversation from you yet, miss. You are supposed to be flattering me and entertaining me.”
     
    “But we are friends… I hope.”
     
    “Try. You need practice. What operas have you seen? What plays?