“She may be seeking fresh air,” she offered. That was one way of describing Lydia’s penchant for engaging in passionate kisses with her latest flirt.

“Likely, she ripped her hem and had to retreat to the ladies’ sitting room,” Giles said, his gaze returning to Yasmin’s face. “My sister is prone to accidents.”

“I was under the impression that those incidents occurred in her first Season? I was in attendance last year when Lady Lydia fell down the steps at the Vauxhall pavilion. I did not see her debut, but I heard—”

“That’s the trouble with society,” Giles interrupted. “You heard about it.”

She really shouldn’t poke the bear. Or, in this case, the hidebound, oh-so-proper peer. Yasmin raised an eyebrow, ignoring her own counsel. “Did your sister not trip over a footstool and fizzle?”

He looked at her blankly.

“Fizzle, fart, foist,” Yasmin explained.

“Such an accident could happen to anyone,” Giles said, the expected disdain crossing his face.

“Indeed, it has happened,” Yasmin said. “As I told Lady Lydia after that tittle-tattle reached my ears, the French propensity for rich food has led to many a public foist, including mine before Napoleon’s assembled court.”

There was a pause. “I suspect you burst into laughter after that mishap,” Giles said, a curious expression in his eyes that she couldn’t quite read.

“I did,” Yasmin confirmed. She had a lifetime’s experience negotiating humiliation in the court. One of her favorite rules for survival amongst the aristocracy—whether French or British—was that a show of weakness had to be avoided at all costs.

“My sister is not as . . . audacious as you are, Lady Yasmin.” There was no mistaking the disapproval in Giles’s voice. Presumably, he thought ladies ought to faint after the disgrace of farting, although men urinated in dining room chamber pots in the full sight of those same ladies.

His opinion shouldn’t matter, but it had the wretched effect of making Yasmin’s throat burn.

“You may loathe gossip, but I loathe rules that pretend no woman breaks wind,” she retorted. “Your sister was shamed for a natural result of the digestive process.”

“Gossip can be ruinous, no matter how innocent a mistake.”

“I know that,” she said. “Believe me, I have experienced the unfortunate consequences of gossip. As I told your sister, one cannot allow such unpleasantness to affect one’s confidence.”

Giles’s mouth tightened. “I didn’t realize you and my sister were so well acquainted.”

It took everything she had not to flinch.

“Well enough to offer unwanted counsel,” Yasmin said. “Oh, don’t look like that. I shan’t infect her with my scandalous ways. Your sister was polite, but no young lady wants advice from a spinster.”

“What?”

He bit the word off, as if the idea of her being a spinster was absurd, but Yasmin wasn’t foolish enough to take it as a compliment. “The distance between seventeen and twenty-four is insurmountable. What’s more, I am not even a female relative. Lady Lydia has taken me in dislike, which should make you happy, shouldn’t it?”