It was not that he was ignoring her. Theodora knew the look of a gentleman ignoring Mrs. Pelling; it was one of the commonest expressions in London. The Duke was doing something quite different. He had come out of the card room a quarter of an hour ago and taken up a position near the second window, with his right shoulder to the wall, and he had been standing there ever since, tall and dark and very still, in a black coat that had obviously been cut by a man who feared him a little. People came to him. They came because he was a duke, and a young one, and unmarried, and had inherited only a year ago from a brother whom everyone had liked rather more; and because he had been a soldier, and stood like one; and because there was a great deal of money and a famous house in Grosvenor Square and a mother who was said to be looking, at last, for a bride. They came, and they spoke, and he turned toward each of them, not just his head but the whole of his body, squarely, as if he were a gun being laid on a target.
Theodora had seen that turning before. She had seen it every day of her life since she was eleven years old.
Mrs. Pelling had arrived on his left side, the side away from the wall. She was a thin, bright, avid woman with a fan of painted chicken-skin, and she had a habit, which Theodora had observed and catalogued in her first Season, of speaking from behind that fan whenever she said anything she might later wish to deny. She said something now. The Duke turned, a fraction too late. He looked, not at her eyes, but at the fan. And Theodora, who could not see Mrs. Pelling's mouth either, saw the Duke's face do a small, terrible thing: it made itself pleasant, and patient, and blank, the way a man's face does when he has decided to guess.
"Yes," he said. "Very much so."
Theodora could read that. It was easy; his mouth was in full view.
Mrs. Pelling lowered the fan by an inch. Her eyebrows rose by two. Over the top of the chicken-skin she said, quite clearly now, "Your Grace astonishes me. I had heard the Duchess would never part with it. Grosvenor Square without a Garnham in it! What will people say?"
So she had asked whether the Dowager Duchess meant to sell Calderwood House. And he had said yes, very much so. By tomorrow it would be in every drawing room in Mayfair.
Theodora did not decide to stand up. She found, afterward, that she had no memory of deciding anything. She was simply on her feet, with her reticule over her wrist, and taking the three steps that brought her to Mrs. Pelling's elbow, where she stopped and turned, deliberately, so that her face was in full light and directly in the Duke's line of sight.