On the whole, today was an improvement over yesterday, and she was willing to believe it was the beginning of a trend.
“Your Grace, we’re given to understand that you’re writing another book,” Mrs. Pariseau said deferentially. She was intrepidly social, Mrs. Pariseau was.
“Yes.”
“How goes your work?” Mrs. Pariseau pressed.
“It goes apace,” he told her, politely. He flicked a glance up from his newspaper.
“Another book?” Mariana took this up, boldly.
“Oh, Miss Wylde,” Mrs. Pariseau said, “perhaps you already know this, but he’s written a very famous book on honor!”
“What was your book called, pray tell, Your Grace?” Mariana ventured.
He stared at her. “Honor.”
She dug her nails into her palm in a vain attempt to keep her face from heating to pink.
“It’s very generous of you to share your expertise, Your Grace. How would anyone know the proper way to behave if we hadn’t a book on the topic?”
He regarded her coolly a moment. “Your question goes some way toward explaining your appearance in the gossip columns, Miss Wylde.”
A little silence ensued.
“I’ve another question, Your Grace.”
He fixed her with those eyes. She met them.
“What does one have to do in order to be dishonorable?”
“If we are adhering strictly to the definition of dishonor . . . it is knowingly behaving in such a way that impugns the dignity of another, or otherwise brings harm. To knowingly and without shame behave without regard for consequences that may bring someone else to harm. In so doing, to violate the rules of polite society.”
She found that she was gripping the table surreptitiously, as if to maintain her grip against the onslaught of certainty. What must it feel like to be so briskly, insufferably certain of oneself? He said things as though they were inalienable truths.
And what the hell did “impugn” mean?
“Who decides what those rules are?”
“Society as a whole in a given era dictates the mores of that era.”
“And then they write about it in the newspaper, I suppose.”
“So it would seem,” he said idly, and returned to his reading.
Her temper began to simmer.
“Will you be addressing all of the virtues in a series of books, then? Is that the book you’re writing now?”
“Why? Have you need of a review of them, Miss Wylde?” he said mildly. “Or perhaps an introduction?”
“I know there are seven. I also can tell you firsthand their application seems rather flexible among the aristocracy.”
“I’m certain you can,” he said with a sort of hateful detachment.
“But it seems to me, Your Grace,” she pressed, “that an intimate knowledge of all the vices would be necessary in order to convincingly write about virtues. Such as honor, for instance.”
He lowered the newspaper, and his dark eyes appeared again.
That momentary flicker in them made her wonder if she was about to be challenged to a duel.
“How do you mean, Miss Wylde?” Mrs. Pariseau piped up.
“How does one describe the day without knowledge of the night? How does one describe honor without a knowledge of dishonor?”
She had his attention. Which was a bit like holding a hot horseshoe freshly forged on an anvil.
“And for that matter, how does one describe, oh, chastity, perhaps, without an intimate knowledge of lust?”
That screen of cynicism moved across his face again, and he eyed her the way he might an ensign he was about to order flogged.
She’d just put the duke in the position of declaiming about chastity and lust. She had no idea if either was considered an official virtue or vice, but she was pretty sure they were considered opposites, and one was considered a sin. She’d done a good deal of soul-searching about both.
She’d take making him uncomfortable as a win.
“May I refer you to prudence and temperance, Miss Wylde, then, if you’re looking for an introduction to virtues,” he said politely. “Although the expression ‘closing the stable door after the horse has bolted’ comes to mind, for some reason.” The last words drifted, and with the tiniest of self-amused smiles, as he returned his attention to the newspaper again.
She was grateful she didn’t have a knitting needle to hand, because she had a fleeting fantasy of hurling one, javelin style, into his forehead.
Dot, listening closely, was puzzled. “Wait. Is chastity a virtue, or just something you call it when you don’t—”
“It’s a virtue, a fine one,” Mrs. Hardy assured her hastily. For the time being, she thought it was probably best not to encourage Dot to entertain complex notions about the permeability between vices and virtues, because she might explain them to the maids. It would lead to more dropped tea trays. Or pregnant maids.
“Your Grace, I apologize for pressing the point”—Mariana of course wasn’t at all sorry—“but have you, then, some experience of dishonor?”
“Given your fascination with contrasts, it sounds to me as though you’re a scholar of Aristotle’s writings on the virtues then, Miss Wylde,” the duke said.
She went silent and fixed him with a cool stare. Because she didn’t quite know who Aristotle was, and she was an actual scholar of nothing apart from how to survive.
He didn’t blink, and neither did she, and this wasn’t easy. Something perverse in her was determined to meet his eyes again and again until she didn’t feel a thing. Certainly not the jolt she felt now, from her forehead to her toes.
“Oh, my mate Aristotle and I regularly have a pint or two together at the pub,” she said finally.
Mr. Delacorte, bless him, chuckled behind her.
“Having only a drink or two with a mate would be the virtue of temperance, Miss Wylde, and having six or seven and getting well and truly foxed would be a vice,” Mrs. Pariseau chimed in. “I know which side I land on.”
Mariana frankly thought it would be rather fun to one day get well and truly foxed with Mrs. Pariseau.
“But I think what His Grace is saying,” Mrs. Pariseau continued diplomatically, “is that you are making quite the Aristotelian argument. Aristotle maintained that virtues are really a sort of . . . oh, how did he put it, Your Grace?”
“A golden mean,” he said at once, because of course he knew everything. “Aristotle defines a virtue as the sort of perfect average between a vice of excess and a vice of deficiency. So it is, after a fashion, a study in contrasts.”
Mariana furrowed her brow. “I think I understand. What you’re saying is, for instance, that an excess of self-righteousness would then be a vice? Because wouldn’t the—what was that again, Mrs. Pariseau?”
“The golden mean,” Mrs. Pariseau replied approvingly.
“—be humility? Or is that on the excess end of the scale, too?”
He studied her, lips slightly pressed together. She’d never known any man who could say so much without changing his expression.
She didn’t even precisely know what she wanted from him. Apart, perhaps, from being seen. This would likely be impossible. Her pride—which wasn’t a particularly useful quality at this point in her life—refused to attempt to ingratiate herself to him, and her instincts told her it was useless. He had sealed her into the little glass jar of his scathing indifference, and she could get no purchase on the slick, unyielding sides of it in order to escape.