Miss Lindel's Love by Cynthia Bailey Pratt

wouldn’t listen. She arranged this plan with your mother so that her costs would be less but the outcome will be the same.”
    Maris felt a little as though she had stood on a beach to watch the tide come in, only to be swept away by a breaker. Lilah looked quite different, her eyes sparkling with determination, her cheeks flushed with indignant rose, and her chin lifted in defiance. Her voice had a ring in it, nothing like her usual soft tones. Maris felt that it was just as well for Lilah’s plans that no young men were present to see her looking so extraordinarily beautiful. She wondered if Mr. Preston appreciated the qualities of his future bride. If it were left to Lilah, he’d soon be an exceedingly prominent sheep farmer.
    “Then you don’t want to be in London at all?”
    “No. Not even remotely. I did, however, promise Mother that I would not act in any manner calculated to give people a disgust of me.” She smiled, a touch slyly. “I could have, very easily. The ton is so readily shocked.”
    “What would you have done?” Maris breathed, fascinated.
    Lilah made an airy gesture. “I had so many plans to be outrageous. It’s just as well I need not implement them. It would be just my misfortune to find that instead of making me an outcast, my exploits would make me the toast of town.”
    “That would be a risk,” Maris agreed. “So instead you show no interest in gentlemen or indeed anything very much.”
    “Exactly. I cultivate an air of world-weariness, though I must confess I do still sometimes blush for Mother. She is so blatant about throwing me at various eligible gentlemen’s heads.” A cloud of memory seemed to wrap about Lilah. “I should warn you, I suppose. Mama’s methods are not always suitably subtle. In fact...”
    Maris waited, but Lilah had obviously thought the better of what she’d begun to say.
    “But, come,” Lilah said, smiling with genuine warmth. “You didn’t knock on my door to ask about my future, did you?”
    “Not really. Speaking of Mrs. Paladin, she said something to me this evening that I didn’t understand.”
    “What was it?”
    Briefly, Maris explained the circumstances of Lord Danesby escorting her to her chaperon’s side. “Your mother asked me if he’d offered me a carte blanche. I know it means ‘white card’ but what the true meaning is I cannot guess.”
    “Are you truly as innocent as all that?” Lilah marveled. “I hadn’t thought anyone was.”
    Though Maris felt a spark of anger at being thought such a ninnyhammer, she concealed it. She couldn’t see that it was in any way her fault. Girls were brought to town to acquire “town bronze,” not because they had it already. Give her a month and she’d have as good a grasp of the essentials of town life as any creature born and bred in London.
    Lilah twisted a lock of her loosened hair as she thought. “How to put this delicately ...”
    “Never mind delicacy. If I am not to continually make a fool of myself, I must know these things. I can’t spend my whole life so innocent that I am mistaken for ignorant.”
    “I quite agree. But take care with whom you speak. I don’t mind; heaven knows I find a little plain-speaking refreshing. There are others, higher sticklers than Mother, who would take it ill that any young woman would be acquainted with such a phrase.”
    “But what does it mean?” Maris asked again, more impatiently.
    “To offer a girl carte blanche means that a man wishes to enter into an irregular relationship with her. He offers her in effect a blank draft on his bank. Anything she wants could be hers so long as his interest does not cool.”
    “‘Irregular relationship,’“ Maris echoed, not feeling particularly enlightened.
    Lilah sighed. “Love but not marriage. Do you understand?”
    “No. Why wouldn’t a man just marry the girl if he loved her that much?”
    “Men don’t always marry where they desire nor always love whom they desire. Sometimes they are