Still irritated, Jules tried to not even look at Vivian. She focused instead on the new people she was meeting, most of whom seemed a lot nicer than Vivian. It would probably be much more fun to work for them.

So she shook hands, smiled and made small talk, and did her best to pretend that Vivian wasn’t there, except as a voice to her right that introduced her to people out of thin air.

The dinner gong (the Chislehursts had a dinner gong?) rang at eight sharp. The party drifted toward the dining room. To Jules’s astonishment, Vivian took hold of her arm.

“Stop sulking,” she muttered.

Jules couldn’t deny it, but she could protest. “I was being nice, wasn’t I?”

“Oh yes,” Vivian said and stuck her nose into the air as she headed for the dining room, letting go of Jules’s arm. “You just might nice us all to death.”

“What?” Jules touched her arm as she followed Vivian. Was her elbow tingling?

“For God’s sake, laugh if you have to and spare me the cold shoulder. Now, do your job.”

Jules’s head spun as she took her seat between two sweet old matrons, one of whom had already shown dangerous signs of talking about her three small dogs.

Do your job? But Jules had been doing her job. She’d been sweet as pie to everybody but Vivian, who didn’t count because Jules was here to schmooze with other people, not with her. They weren’t even sitting together. And Jules doubted anybody else would have noticed she’d been pissed off. So the “cold shoulder” remark must have meant…

Had it bothered Vivian personally?

The question gnawed at Jules all through dinner, and she was grateful that she didn’t have to do much more than make sympathetic noises about the stock exchange and exclaim over toy poodles with the old woman sitting across the table.

“Oh yes,” she said. “Breed standards. So important.”

The old woman tilted her head. “It’s lovely to meet a young person who understands. Especially an American!”

Best not to mention Jules’s knowledge of dog breeding was limited to watching Best In Show. “It’s a lost art, ma’am.”

The old woman beamed.

Jules and Vivian stayed for the whole meal this time. Jules was glad because the food was delicious, although Vivian had made clear she wasn’t the best judge of such things. And she needed time to get her bearings. By the time the butler helped Vivian into her coat, Jules, bolstered by good food and coffee, felt marginally more in control of herself.

Vivian didn’t even wait for the door to close behind them before she said, “I despise passive-aggressiveness.”

“Um…”