The word love threw him off balance; he had not connected these particular dots for himself yet, but Noble was right. He sank back onto his heels from where he had been carrying himself on the balls of his feet and looked almost thoughtful. He had faked sentiment before, sort of. Plenty of people thought he was enamored with Ida Chang, over the past season, but that was less to do with any willful deception on his part and more to do with society's willingness to read romance into any conversation that lasted more than three minutes. And he did genuinely enjoy talking to Miss Chang, which helped — and she was in on it, which helped even more. None of those things were guaranteed with Miss Farley; he didn't know her well enough to say whether he could like her, and she certainly had plenty of reason to dislike him.

"They need to think I seduced her, at least," he said after thinking it through a minute. A minor difference, but potentially an important one. "So — how do we sell that? I don't know her at all," he admitted. "Do you?" She was closer in age to the girls, but for obvious reasons it would be problematic for Ford to approach Grace or Clementine and ask for a few notes on the personality or interests of a girl he had allegedly been secretly romancing for weeks.

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