Oz raised both eyebrows at her question, baffled for a moment by the reference to Sleeping Beauty. The plot of a ballet might not have been so easy to follow as that of a play, but he did think he'd have known had he seen an entirely different show. Didn't Sleeping Beauty involve an evil sorceress and some fairies? Then he put two and two together: she didn't think he'd actually watched the performance.

"If that was Sleeping Beauty, I'm afraid your costumer may soon be out of a job," he responded. His tone was light enough, but he wasn't sure what to think of her testing him in this way. Did people really skip the performance and then still show up backstage to gawk at the ballerinas? He found the idea exceptionally distasteful. He had already not been impressed with the behavior of some of the men around him, but at least they had the pretense of being patrons of the arts to fall back on to save their dignity. If they couldn't even manage a few hours to watch the performance and maintain the facade, they'd do better dragging themselves off to the nearest whore-house; it would certainly be cheaper than regular donations to the ballet. In any case, the fact that she had lumped him into that group bruised his ego. "And your choreographer, too. At no point during the performance could I have believed you were asleep."

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