As Miss Blackwood finished off the round, quite poorly, Ophelia felt a momentary pang of sympathy. The other girl was younger than her, and when Ophelia had been twenty-one she had been in a similarly luckless and loveless position (as Miss Blackwood had, so far as Ophelia knew, no particular romantic prospects to speak of). Where Miss Blackwood technically outmatched her within the framework of birth and breeding, Ophelia had clearly exceeded her in charm and capabilities, and she was inclined to think the benefits of the latter far outweighed the former. Any handicap she might have had from her comparatively lowlier upbringing had been refined away at Mrs. Pendergast's finishing school, after all. There was nothing to be done, on the other hand, for someone who simply wasn't an interesting person to have around.

(Well, the thing to be done was, apparently, to throw a rather contrived dinner party such as this one and force your guests to talk to them anyway. Ophelia wondered if Mrs. Blackwood would be taking a leaf from Mrs. Daphnel's book if this season produced no suitable prospects for her daughter. Twenty-one was a perfectly respectable age to be still exploring the social world and remaining relatively unattached, but twenty-two with no suitors waiting in the wings was not).

Her thoughts returned to the table as her next partner arrived, a man she knew by reputation but did not believe she had ever carried an actual conversation with. He was a bit older than her husband, and therefore a good deal older than her, so their social circles did not tend to overlap. Besides, she had always assumed (perhaps because of his expression when she did meet him or perhaps because of his occupation) that he was too stoic to be much fun. Hopefully that would not prove the case, for the sake of her sanity through the next round.