He looked at her with those unhurried gray eyes. "I have been coming to Mrs. Hartwell's lectures for 2 years. I have never seen you here." "I sit at the back," he said. "I don't like being introduced." Eleanor considered this. It was, she admitted to herself privately, a more satisfying answer than she had wanted. She had been prepared for arrogance, for a duke's casual assumption that his presence anywhere was welcome and unremarkable. She was not prepared for a man who attended botanical lectures quietly and sat at the back to avoid the fuss.
"And Q," she said. Pause. Small. Almost undetectable. "I go on Tuesdays." "So do I." "I know," he said. And then, before she could construct the response she deserved to give him, "Your paper on Drosera adaptation, the one published in the Linnaean correspondence last spring. I read it." Eleanor's mouth opened, then closed. This was not the conversation she had been having in her head.
"You read it," she said flatly. "Twice," he said. "I disagreed with your conclusion about moisture retention in elevated altitudes." The heat came back to her neck. But this time it was not embarrassment. This time it was something that lived right next to argument, so close you could barely see the boundary between them. "You disagreed," she said.
"The sample population was too narrow." "The sample population," Eleanor said with great precision, "was entirely appropriate for a preliminary study, which I stated clearly in the third paragraph, which suggests you either read it hastily or" "I read it thoroughly," he said. "I simply think you drew a larger conclusion than the data warranted."
"And I think," Eleanor said, "that dismissing a preliminary study because it does not provide final answers is exactly the kind of thinking that keeps half of botanical science standing still." He looked at her. She looked at him. Something moved through the air between them, quick and electric and gone before she could name it properly.
"That is a fair point," he said. She had expected him to push back. She had her next sentence ready. The concession landed wrong, unexpected, and she lost her footing in the argument without him having to do anything at all. "Yes," she said, slightly wrong-footed. "It is." The ghost of that almost smile returned to the corner of his mouth. She was beginning to find it insufferable, that almost smile. The way it appeared and then didn't, like a word he kept deciding not to say.
She left shortly after. Not fleeing, she was specific about this in her own mind, simply finished. Outside on the pavement, the evening air was cool and smelled of rain that hadn't fallen yet. She stood for a moment before flagging a cab, her notebook pressed against her chest, the city moving past in amber and gaslight. She thought about the way he had said "twice." She thought about the narrow gap between their shoulders when they had been standing at the bookcase, close enough that she had been able to hear him breathe. She pressed her lips together. Went home. Did not think about it further. Except that she did, in the small traitorous hours of the night, when the house was quiet and the only honest company left was the one inside her own chest. She thought about it quite a lot. And found, to her considerable irritation, that the thought was not entirely unwelcome.