“This is an unexpected pleasure,” Miss Goddard said, getting to her feet as Angeline was shown into a small parlor.

“I hope it is a pleasure and not an imposition,” Angeline said, taking the seat Miss Goddard indicated and removing her gloves. “It is just that I realized last evening when I saw you hidden in the shadows of the ballroom that I had been hoping ever since first meeting you that we could be friends. Which is absurd, I know, when you are an intelligent, well-educated, well-read lady while I—”

She stopped abruptly.

“While you—?” Miss Goddard raised her eyebrows.

“I chatter,” Angeline said. “Constantly. About nothing at all. I cannot seem to help it. My governesses—all of them—told me I had nothing but fluff in my head and that it revealed itself whenever I opened my mouth. And I never made any particular effort to learn from them. I would sometimes try, but my mind would wander after a few moments. I hated poetry and drama in particular. Miss Pratt used to read a poem or a play out loud, giving very deliberate emphasis to every word, and she would stop after every few lines in order to point out all the literary and intellectual merits contained in them. By the time she got to the end of a poem or speech, I had no idea how it had started and was almost screaming with boredom.”

“So would I have been,” Miss Goddard surprised her by saying. “What a perfectly dreadful way to teach. I really do not believe I would have liked your Miss Pratt. I suppose she was a very worthy lady.”

There was a twinkle in her eye.

“Oh, very,” Angeline said. “There was not a fault to be found in her. Which made my behavior toward her that much more reprehensible. I played the most awful tricks on her. I put a huge daddy longlegs of a spider between her sheets one evening, and her screams when she went to bed must have woken everyone in the village a mile away. I felt ashamed of that one afterward, though, for I knew she had an unnatural fear of spiders.”

“It was probably not your finest moment,” Miss Goddard said. “But it does sound as if you were severely provoked. Learning ought to be exciting. Reading ought to be. How can one possibly enjoy it, though, when one is forced to stop every few lines to listen to someone else’s interpretation of what has been written? Especially the interpretation of someone worthy.”

Angeline laughed, and so did Miss Goddard. But she had expressed very similar ideas about learning to those Lord Heyward had expressed at Vauxhall. Could learning ever be exciting?

“Did you want to discuss Paradise Lost?” Miss Goddard asked. “It is some time since I read it, but it left a lasting impression upon me and I would be happy to share my thoughts with you.”

She would like it of all things, Angeline thought. She would really love to have a friend with whom she could talk about sensible, intelligent things. But it was not why she had made a point of coming here today. Today she had something else to say—something noble. Today she would do something for someone else, she would be unselfish, and then she would feel better. She needed to feel better. She had spent so many wakeful hours last night telling herself that she had enjoyed herself at the Hicks ball more than she had enjoyed herself on any other occasion in her life that her head had ached with all the happiness, and so had her heart. After this visit she could feel truly happy.

“I really came to talk about the Earl of Heyward,” she said, leaning slightly forward in her chair.

“Oh.” Miss Goddard sat slightly back in hers. “Are you regretting that you refused him?”

“No, not at all,” Angeline said, her heart plummeting nevertheless to take up residence in the soles of her shoes. “I want to ask you a question. You must not feel obliged to answer, for of course it is impertinent of me and absolutely none of my concern. But all this business of ton alliances and marriages is horridly complicated, you know. Everyone wants to marry well, which means choosing and setting one’s cap at the most eligible … other. I will not say man, because it works both ways, though that did not really occur to me until after I had come to town and made my come-out. I had always thought that it was only we ladies who would be hoping to find the perfect husband, but of course that was shortsighted of me because men have to marry too, for a variety of reasons, and they also want to marry the very best candidate. And the very best, for both men and women, is not necessarily the person they like best. It is often whom their family likes best, or who society suggests is best, or who has the most illustrious title and lineage or the most money, provided it has not been acquired in business or commerce, of course, for then it is tainted by vulgarity, just as if money were not simply money. No one even thinks about love or the fact that the two people have to live together after they marry and make the best of what often turns out to be not a very great bargain at all even if it pleases all the rest of the world. People can be terribly foolish, can they not?”

“Far too frequently,” Miss Goddard agreed. “What is your question, Lady Angeline?”

“Well, it is very impertinent,” Angeline said. “But I shall ask it anyway since it is what I came here to do. Do you love Lord Heyward, Miss Goddard? I mean, do you love him in a way that makes you ache here when you think that perhaps you will never have him?” She tapped a closed fist over her heart.

Miss Goddard sat farther back in her chair and set her arms along the armrests. She looked perfectly relaxed—except that the fore- and middle fingers of her right hand were beating out a fast little tattoo.

“Why would you ask such a question?” she asked. “We are friends. We have been for years.”

“But would you marry him if he asked?” Angeline asked her.

Miss Goddard opened her mouth once to speak but closed it again. She started once more after a short silence.

“We once had an agreement,” she said, “that we would marry each other at some time in the distant future if nothing happened in the meanwhile to change our minds. Neither of us felt drawn to marriage at the time, though we both recognized that eventually we might see the advisability or the necessity of entering the marital state rather than remaining single. We were seekers of knowledge at the time, two earnest young people who had not yet felt the pull of the world beyond the pages of a book or the learned confines of Cambridge or the exciting workings of our own minds. Something did happen to change our minds, of course. Edward’s brother died and he became the earl in his place. It made all the difference, you know. Not to who he is, but to what. And the what is important in the real world.”

“But why?” Angeline asked her. “He does not need to marry money. At least, I do not believe he does, or Tresham would not even have allowed him to speak to me yesterday. He does not need to marry position. All society really demands of him is that he marry respectably. You are eminently respectable, Miss Goddard. You are a lady, and you are refined and sensible and intelligent. And you are his friend.”

Miss Goddard smiled.

“Lady Angeline,” she said, “you refused Edward yesterday. Are you trying to matchmake for him today?”

Angeline looked down at her hands. It was precisely what she was doing. Though not so much for him as for her new friend, whom she liked exceedingly well. She dearly loved Martha and Maria and hoped they would remain her close friends for the rest of her life, but Miss Goddard was the friend she had always yearned to have. She could not understand quite why it was so. It just was. And it hurt her heart to see her friend a wallflower at balls, unseen and unappreciated when she was the equal of anyone and the superior of most. She was Angeline’s superior.

“It just struck me,” she said, “that in all likelihood you love him and he loves you and yet he was forced into offering for me. Not literally forced, I suppose, but definitely maneuvered by what society expects of him. And by his family too, even though they are very pleasant people. I believe they actually like me and genuinely believed that I would be the best possible wife for him. But it is you he ought to marry. It is you he must marry. When he strolled about the ballroom with you last evening after supper—after you danced with Lord Windrow—you looked very right together. As if you belonged with each other.”

“He certainly thought you looked very happy,” Miss Goddard said.

“Oh,” Angeline said. “I was happy. Quite blissfully so. I have never enjoyed an evening so well in my life.”

She looked down at her hands again. And instead of picking up the conversation, Miss Goddard let it rest. The silence stretched. Angeline looked up again after what must have been a full minute.

“I just want to be your friend,” she said, “if that does not strike you as being too utterly absurd. I thought we might walk together in the park occasionally or go to the library together or spend a little while in each other’s company if we are attending the same entertainment. But I also want you to know that I will not find it awkward if you wish to encourage Lord Heyward’s suit. I will not feel you are somehow betraying me—if you accept my friendship, that is. Indeed, I would be very happy for you. I—Oh, dear, I have no right to be saying any of this. And the very idea that you would wish to be my friend—”