Pat wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t. “I don’t know what I’d do if he was openly rude to my face, though we may well find out before this party is over. But there’s nothing wrong with trying to keep the peace. Guests at the Earl’s table can’t get into brawls with his son-in-law.”

“Yes, but I bet you won’t just giggle.” Fen sounded furious, possibly with herself. “Whereas I always react with—with fluff.”

“That’s not a virtue of mine, it’s an incapacity. I’m no good at smoothing over situations and making things easy for people, and I couldn’t be fluffy to save my life. May I make an observation?”

“Go on.”

“You’re awfully down on yourself, and I don’t see why,” Pat said. “There’s nothing in the world wrong with you, including your laugh.” She didn’t mention the bosom, with which there was absolutely nothing wrong at all. Quite the opposite. “And really, it seems to me that you’d have less trouble getting people to treat you with respect if you gave yourself a little more. People are awfully lazy, and ready to take other people at the value they put on themselves without thinking twice. You can’t expect someone like Jimmy to, to—”

“Have any insight into his future wife’s character?”

“I don’t know how you get away with the fluffy business for a minute,” Pat said with feeling. “All right, yes. But that’s in your hands as well as his. If you want to marry him and be happy, perhaps you need to have a frank conversation about what you’re both hoping for before you find yourselves stuck with one another for good under a lot of misapprehensions.”

“Yes,” Fen said. “We should. Only, I have been here for three days now, and every time I have asked Jimmy to explain how something works, or to talk about the future, he’s changed the subject. That walk around the lake we had earlier—I hoped he might talk to me, and I thought he might make love to me, but do you know what he actually did?”

“No,” Pat said, with foreboding.

“Talked about you.”

“What?”

“He talked about all your shooting achievements,” Fen said with precision, “and then he talked about how he’d met you, which led him on to a number of reminiscences of your brother at Oxford and visits to your family and how marvellously you ran the house and what a wonderfully quiet, soothing person you are—”

“Fen! Listen. If you are afraid Jimmy harbours any sort of—of feelings for me, you couldn’t be more wrong. We’ve known one another for years. He could have proposed at any time if he wanted to, and he didn’t.”

“Did you want him to?” Fen asked, then caught herself. “I beg your pardon. I shouldn’t have asked that.”