There was a shift in the attitude of the room, and one he recognized easily. Griffith had written him off. This was hardly a surprising turn of events; most people did. Usually Don Juan took these instances with a carefree shrug — he clung desperately to the facade that he didn't care what anyone thought, and he had perfect this particular facet of it through years of practice — but in this instance he took a breath, on the verge of protesting. The assumptions Griffith had made riled him more than most assumptions about him did. He did care what became of Elfrieda, and it seemed to him Griffith's short-sightedness that had lead him to the opposite conclusion; he clearly hadn't thought the matter through very well if he thought the only way to demonstrate care would have been to clamber for information and then rush to her side. Indiscretion had burned them both before, and her far more than him. Which was not to say that Don Juan had learned discretion — quite the opposite. A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all, someone had written once. Circumspection and devotion are a contradiction in terms. Indiscretion seemed baked into his core; certainly it was interwoven in everything the pair of them had shared. He didn't know how to proceed without it, but was too cautious of hurting her again to ignore it.

So he had straightened up slightly, inhaled, ready to protest — but ultimately deflated again. What did it matter, in the end, what Samuel Griffith thought of him? Probably nothing Don Juan would say would sway his opinion much; even if it did, his opinion was unlikely to matter much. It wasn't as though he'd intimated that he was in her confidences, and after their interactions so far at the dinner party it seemed unlikely he would be counted amongst Don Juan's friends any time soon. So he was on the verge of merely shrugging the whole interaction off and letting Griffith go back to the table — except that he couldn't make sense of Griffith's follow-on remark, and they were odd enough that he couldn't quite let them go unremarked upon, either.

"Wait," he said, having made no move to follow Griffith to the door yet. "Paris?"

---