be seen) was yet another injury to be laid at the door of my prospective cousin-in-law, the viscount. I am not cursed, I hope, with undue pride of place, but I am, after all, a Countess. No thoughtful host would have ever seated me next to the son of an apothecary, and had I not been forced to sit next to James at dinner, he never would have had the opportunity to gain such unfettered access to my lap.
I pause to emphasize another fact that everyone has surely already noticed—the proper way to eat the meat course is with both hands on the table, fork in one hand and knife in the other. If any further proof of James’s ill breeding was necessary, this incident that first night at dinner should put the issue beyond all question. During the soup course, such a foray into another guest’s lap would be less objectionable, but a man who would keep his left hand busy caressing his neighbor’s thigh when any civilized person should be handling a knife at table…I leave you to draw your own conclusions about such a man’s level of refinement.
I resolved to distract myself from my own unpleasant situation by focusing my energies on aiding my cousin, and my first obligation to Charlotte, as I saw it, was to remedy the unfortunate fact of her virginity before sending her to the altar, although I was frankly at a loss as to how I could accomplish this, cast as I was in the midst of the tiresomely upstanding people whose society her betrothed favored. At first, I also hoped that for Charlotte’s sake there might be some chance of aiding the groom, as well (I have a very lovely maid named Claudette, and with her the young man’s training would have been in competent hands). Sadly, it was soon clear to me that the young Viscount’s ascetic mania ran too deep to be cured. He was handsome, and seemed physically vigorous, but he had the pinched, self-congratulatory manner that is the inevitable accompaniment to a prudish and false piety, and almost from the moment I met him, I decided he was beyond help.
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