Even as Ida asked the question, she knew it wasn’t the one she should be asking. The feeling was reminiscent of sitting in a dense lecture, and you’ve yet to see how all the pieces of an equation fit together into a formula. To make it worse, her inquiry felt imprecise from the outset - because Ida didn’t simply want to ‘strike up conversation.’ It was a start, but Ida’s desired outcome was to convince the ballerina. Not that she could tell Mister Greengrass about the true nature of how she felt. In fact, she hardly knew if she had the gumption to tell the dancer herself.

But Mister Greengrass was good at being sociable, which was why she asked him. At least, he usually was. The witch had been lost in an idle train of thought for a beat too long, because he didn’t answer her straight away. Instead when Ida snapped-to, he seemed to be staring at a spot directly above her left shoulder. An eyebrow raised, and Ida ticked her head back to see what he could be looking at. She found nothing there but a few bushes.

Her motion might have startled Mister Greengrass back to life, however. And what he said was curious – it depends on what you want from them. So did he always go into a conversation with an agenda? …Even her, then? Such a manipulative approach felt contradictory to the image she’d been drafting of Greengrass in her mind thus far. But then, perhaps she was being manipulative too. Setting aside the obvious way she wasted this man’s time finding someone marriageable, she hoped to win the dancer’s heart with guile and charisma she did not ordinarily possess. Now how is that the basis of a healthy relationship, if it’s borne from lies?

Ida caught herself frowning again, and tried to flip it into a flicker of an appreciative smile. “I suppose I want them to agree with me,” she decided, in case the context was pertinent to his recommendation. “I want them to go along with my plan. Would anything about your approach change at all?”

Ida stopped her train of thought with a ponderous drag of the cigarette, pausing to hear two other revelers that spilled out of the party on the other side of the terrace. They were having some kind of animated conversation she couldn’t make out, too caught up in each other to take much notice of the two of them over here.

“Well, I haven’t a plan, really,” she clarified. “I only want this person to like me.”

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