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do enjoy beauty, but I enjoy it the same way I enjoy a cigar, with the understanding that while it gives temporary pleasure, it is essentially meaningless, and perhaps might even be harmful in the long run.”
     
    “That is a very cynical view of beauty.”
     
    “That is all the consideration beauty deserves,” said the duke coolly.
     
    “You might have a slightly more difficult time than you first anticipated, Venetia,” said Helena softly.
     
    “The duke is clearly a troublemaker.” In whom Venetia was developing a rather lively interest, an interest that was perhaps warmer than warranted for a potential brother-in-law.
     
    A young man leaped to his feet. “Sir, if I understand you correctly, you have essentially declared all beautiful women untrustworthy.”
     
    Venetia tsked. The duke had said no such thing: He’d advised a neutral stance on the consideration of beauty. Beautiful women, like all other women, should be approached and judged on aspects beyond mere physical attributes. And what was wrong with that?
     
    “But beautiful women
are
essentially untrustworthy,” replied the duke.
     
    Venetia frowned. Not that old chestnut. It was as bad as equating beauty with virtue. Worse, probably.
     
    “A beautiful woman is desired for as long as her beauty holds, forgiven for all trespasses, and never asked to be anything other than beautiful.”
     
    Venetia snorted. If only.
     
    “But surely, sir, the rest of us are not so blind as that,” argued the young man.
     
    “Allow me to present some anecdotal evidence, then. Anecdotal evidence does not constitute data. But where unbiased, unpolluted data is not possible—a given when it comes to the study of the human psyche—we will have to make do.
     
    “Some years ago, I passed through London in the latter part of August, a time when English Society vacates the city entirely and repairs to the country. My club was empty, except for myself and another man.
     
    “I knew this man because he’d once been pointed out to me as the husband of a very beautiful woman. He spoke briefly of his wife and warned that a man shouldn’t covet her unless that man wanted to become like him.
     
    “The conversation was distasteful to me. It also made no sense, until I read the man’s obituary in the papers a few days later. I made some inquiries and learned that not only was he bankrupt, he had also run up exceedingly large accounts at several jewelers. The circumstances of his death had very nearly triggered an inquest.”
     
    Something clanged inside Venetia’s head. This woman, whom the duke clearly blamed for her husband’s death … Could he possibly be speaking of
her
?
     
    “His widow remarried scarcely a year later, to a much older, very wealthy man. Rumors were rife that she conducted an affair with his good friend. And when he was on his deathbed, she did not even have the courtesy to attend him. He died alone.”
     
    He
was
speaking of her, only with the facts hideously distorted. She wanted to cover her ears, but she couldn’t move. She couldn’t even blink, but could only stare at him with the blind gaze of a statue.
     
    The judgment on her second marriage stung, but that didn’t quite matter as much—she’d helped spread some of those rumors herself. But what he’d implied about Tony, in Tony’s own words, no less, insinuating that Tony wouldn’t have killed himself had it not been for her …
     
    “Exceptionally heartless, our beauty.”
     
    Had his speech slowed? Each damning syllable hung for an eternity in the air, an air brilliant with the projecting lantern’s beam, a thousand specks of mote caught in a harsh white radiance.
     
    “You’d think an odor of censure would hang about her,” the duke continued inexorably. “But no, she is welcomed everywhere and constantly pelted with proposals of marriage. No one, it seems, can remember her past. So, yes, I do believe the rest of us are indeed that blind.”
     
    There were