He met her gaze with the fondest smile she had ever seen him bear. “I believe Elinor deserves it.”

“So do I,” Emma replied, glaring at Joan with a fierceness that would make any sister proud. “After all, the women you rage against, Joan, were my friends before they were hers. I wonder how you spoke about me before I married.”

“I’m not the only one with these opinions,” Joan protested, flinging her arm out to include a majority of the others. “Any one of the others could have said the same.”

“True,” Elinor murmured, speaking up for the first time, and eyeing her cousin with some sympathy, knowing only too well how it felt to be the center of such an attack. “And only the other day, all of the others were.”

Joan looked at Elinor almost in fear, while her sisters and cousins looked uncomfortable with themselves.

Elinor sighed, weary of the entire conversation now, and desperate to be gone. “I need no apology, despite Partlowe’s kindness to suggest it. May we please simply not discuss it any further, and leave my friends out of our conversations?”

“Yes,” Joan immediately said, seizing upon the option with evident relief. “Yes, we may, absolutely.”

“Excellent.” Elinor rose, smiling just a little at the room. “If you’ll all excuse me, I feel the need for a walk.” She curtseyed, winked at Ellen, then strode from the room quickly, her steps filled with an agitation she couldn’t properly express.

Oh, to be forced to spend more time in the company of people who thought so little of her! She’d never regretted her friendship with the Spinsters, though she had some regrets about her behavior within them. She had never found friends her own age with whom she had wished to associate closely, finding them to be silly and ignorant.

In the last year or so, she had found a couple of girls that defied that judgment, but she had only become friends with them because of the Spinsters.

She was who she was because of the Spinsters.

That was not going to change, no matter how her puffed-up cousins despaired.

Hugh’s elegant speech and Partlowe’s change of heart were not going to change the opinions of her relations, if only those opinions were discussed. It would be difficult to go on either way, knowing what she now did.

If she married, she would know that she surprised her cousins and they will have thought her cured of such an influence.

If she did not, the cloud of their cruel opinions and sickening pity would hang low over her at every family occasion.

“Damned if I do,” she muttered as she walked further into the depths of Deilingh. “And damned if I don’t.”

“Oh, I’d be hard pressed to consider you damned no matter which way the wind blows.”

Elinor stopped suddenly and looked around, unsure where the voice came from.