With a growing sense of dread in the pit of her stomach, Ida convinced herself that the move had somehow said something. What thing, she could only guess. But the man was now definitely reading into whatever “it” is; she could tell because he didn’t say anything about what she said while he contemplated what she didn’t say. This left Ida nervously clasping both of her hands together around her glass, as if she were giving herself a little prayer. An invocation for embarrassment to turn into an ailment that could strike her dead. Or at the very least, make her faint. Then he gets to be a hero, and she gets to be out of this situation. (Could she learn to faint on command? It seems like a useful skill.) But as it stands now, there was no way to tell Mister Greengrass this was a grave mistake without offending him terribly… And now that she’s gone and dug her grave, she now had to lie in it.

“Oh,” she balked slightly at his request, then decided to buy time with a dainty sip from her glass. He was literally the one and only person that had asked her to dance, seeing as most were put off by her height, her generally morbid and dour personality, or both.

“Yes. I do. Just, er–” What a horrific time to get tongue-tied, “I just don’t do gallops,” she finally mustered. What a terrible dance. Every time she’d taken a gallop with a man he seemed to spring some surprise on her: with one man she had to clarify he was not proposing to her, and with the next she had to clarify that he was not propositioning her. Nothing good came from gallops.

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