been. Captain Vossey had borrowed twenty pounds from young Mr. Quilling and was explaining, with great charm, why he could not repay it before Michaelmas. And Theodora's mother, three chairs along, was explaining to Mrs. Pelling that Theodora had been unwell in the spring and that was why she had not been seen at Almack's, which was not true; Theodora had not been seen at Almack's because the Ivers family had not been given vouchers, and had not been given vouchers because Sir Humphrey Ivers owed money to half of Wiltshire.
Theodora did not hold this against her mother. It was a thing mothers said. She only wished Lady Ivers would not keep looking down the row of chairs at her with that expression, half encouragement and half despair, as if Theodora were a horse that had been entered in a race and had lain down in the paddock.
She was not plain, exactly. She had been told so, kindly, by people who meant it as a compliment. She had brown hair that did what it was asked and very little more, and grey eyes that her father called thoughtful and her mother called unfortunate, because they gave her a look, Lady Ivers said, of being about to ask a question. She was of middle height and middling figure and she wore, tonight, a gown of pale green sarsnet that had been made over from last year with new sleeves. She danced adequately when asked. She was not often asked. She had a reputation, insofar as she had any reputation at all, for being quiet, and she had discovered that quietness, in a ballroom, was very nearly the same as invisibility. Gentlemen looked at her the way they looked at the Chinese jar. They were vaguely aware that it was valuable to someone.
She had made her peace with that. Or rather, she had made an arrangement with it, which was not the same thing as peace but lasted longer. While nobody looked at her, she could think. And Theodora had a great deal to think about this Season, very little of which concerned the gentlemen of Lady Cressingham's ballroom, and all of which would have horrified her mother.
She was thinking about eleven names on a list in her writing box at home. She was thinking about a room above a cooper's shop in Plough Court that could be had for fourteen pounds a year, and about another room in Red Lion Court that was better lit but cost twenty. She was thinking about slates, which were cheap, and slate pencils, which were cheaper, and about whether Mrs. Bartle the printer could be persuaded to give her another three months' credit, when she became aware that the Duke of Calderwood was standing perhaps fifteen feet away from her, and that he was not listening to Mrs. Pelling.