"Oh!" Juliana responded, quite surprised by the invitation. Pleasantly surprised, though, she thought. She was hardly opposed to getting a cup of tea with Miss Smith; she simply hadn't expected her to ask. "No, I don't suppose they would," she admitted, glancing over her shoulder at the bustle of people. They had other things to occupy their minds at the moment, anyway. Eventually they would probably run out of things to do and wonder where she'd gotten off to, but that didn't seem a very good reason to turn down an invitation to tea. If she went and told them she was running off, though, they might try to stop her... or at the very least, they might ask questions about where she was going, and with whom. She had never been much of a debutante, but occasionally traces of that mindset — that she ought to be chaperoned and protected when she went out — still showed in their habits.

"Let me tell my brother I'm going," she decided. "Then when they do miss me, at least they won't worry."