Page 23 of The Duke and His Cinderella
“Oh, look,” Phineas said, quickly changing the subject. “Here is Lady Eleanor. I suppose you’ll have met her on your way in, Nicholas?”
“Indeed,” Nicholas said, turning to see that Lady Eleanor was now approaching them His heart skipped a beat. She was as lovely to him as she had been the first time he had seen her. He felt a thrill that she had chosen him to come and speak to—even if it did seem as though she had only really come to talk to Phineas.
“Finally, we’re finished welcoming guests!” Lady Eleanor said, taking a sip of her drink. She looked from Phineas to Nicholas. “Do you two know one another, then?”
“We were in school together,” Phineas explained. “Nicholas is an old friend of mine.”
“Well, that’s nice,” Lady Eleanor said. “I’m glad this week has given you the chance to spend some time together.”
“I’m very grateful for that opportunity as well,” Nicholas said. “Since our school days, life has gotten busy, and I’m afraid I don’t see any of my friends as much as I would like.”
“But we’ll be able to spend this whole week catching up with one another,” Phineas said with a smile. “And enjoying the spectacle, of course. Jacob getting married! I can hardly believe it’s happening. You and I will be family now, Eleanor.”
“And I can’t think of anyone I would rather have as a brother,” Lady Eleanor said with a smile.
“Weddings are certainly a happy occasion,” Nicholas said.
“Usually,” Lady Eleanor said.
There was quite a bit of reservation in her voice. Nicholas didn’t quite know what to make of it. “Usually?”
“Well, of course, a marriage is notalwaysa happy occasion,” she said.
“You think not?”
“I don’t expect to be as happy on my own wedding day as my sister is on hers, for instance.”
“I hadn’t realized you were to marry.”
“Oh every young lady is expected to marry if she doesn’t wish to disappoint her family,” Lady Eleanor said. “But I’m sure you knewthat. Being a gentleman yourself, I’m sure it’s something you count on!”
“What doesthatmean?” Nicholas didn’t know whether to feel offended or simply mystified.
“It means that gentlemen rely on the fact that ladies feel compelled to marry,” she said. “That's how they can feel confident that they'll be able to find someone to marry. If it weren't for the fact that young ladies have to marry, gentlemen wouldn't be able to feel so assured of finding someone.”
"Is that really what you believe?" Nicholas asked. "You think that no gentleman would ever marry if it weren't for the fact that young ladies are compelled by society to find a good marriage? You believe that no young ladies are getting married because they genuinely want to and have found someone that they've fallen in love with?”
"I wouldn't suggest that every marriage is like that," Eleanor said. For example, I don't believe that my sister's marriage to Jacob is like that. The two of them are genuinely in love. But I don't believe that that sort of thing is anywhere near as common as it ought to be, nor do I believe that gentlemen are aware of just how often the ladies that they marry are only doing so because they feel compelled to, whether by society or by their families. I believe that if gentleman truly stopped to examine the reasons why ladies enter into marriages, they would be astounded.”
“And I would say," Nicholas said, "that perhaps you are the one who needs to examine your assumptions. Perhaps you don't know as much as you believe you do about what gentlemen think or how they feel about the marriages that they enter into."
"Are you married?" Lady Eleanor asked him. raising an eyebrow.
“Eleanor," Phineas hissed. Don't be rude, you're addressing the duke."
"I know who he is," Eleanor said. "And I don't believe I am being rude. Although I must say, it would fit with what I have come to expect of gentlemen in society that I would be expected to hold my tongue and not speak the truth about how I feel and what I think in the interest of appearing polite."
“I don’t expect you to hold your tongue,” Nicholas told her. Once again, he felt torn between amusement and anger. Nobody ever spoke to him the way she was. Phineas was right—he was a duke, and though that wasn’t a title he often liked to wave around, itdid come with a certain amount of respect that he had gotten used to people observing when it came to conversation with him. He could see that Lady Eleanor was different from anybody else, but what made her believe it was all right to talk to him so brusquely?
He could come to only one conclusion—she must not care very much about his title. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know who he was—she knew perfectly well. It simply hadn’t impacted her behavior toward him.
If he stopped to think about it, he supposed there was something rather lovely about that. Who else in his life—other than his own mother, and an occasional friend, like Phineas—would speak to him as if he was a human being instead of someone who had to be paid respect? Who would dare to argue with him? And it wasn’t as if she was arguing about something absurd or completely out of line. She had every right to her opinions about the nature of marriage and the way it affected young ladies.
It even occurred to him that she, too, might not have anyone she could speak to about the things that troubled her. She’d said herself that the expectation to bite her tongue was something she had grown used to. Perhaps that meant that no one else in her life allowed her to speak the way she was speaking to him currently. Maybe she had lost her temper with a stranger because everyone who was close to her insisted that she keep it.
Although there had been rudeness in it, Nicholas found he had rather enjoyed being the person she was free with. Far fromturning him off to her, he realized he was more eager than ever to go on spending time with her as this week went on.
“I’d better get back to Marina, she said. “Phineas, you and I will find one another later, I trust?”
