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about the Swinleys* financial dilemma. Any one of those events would be death to her plans.
    Eveleen joined her that minute, fresh from the dance, her cheeks glowing from the exercise and her blue eyes bright. "That will do. Captain Harris," she said to her scarlet-coated escort. "You may go and flirt with the younger ladies, now that you have done your duty by the confirmed spinster."
    The man bent close to her ear and murmured something, a gallantry, no doubt, and she giggled and tapped him lightly on the arm with her fan. He turned and retreated in the direction of blond and beautiful Lady Cynthia. Eveleen took a deep breath. "Well, and so you are unclaimed yet again?"
    "You make me sound like a parcel that no one wants," Arabella said, waspishly.
    Chuckling, Eveleen said, "Why do you think they call us 'on the shelf when too many years have passed and we have not married? We are goods, chattel to be bartered while we have worth and forgotten when we are no longer fresh."
    Arabella glanced at her friend in shock. "That is revolutionary talk."
    "I am Irish; it comes naturally." Eveleen, her eyes blazing with mischief, scanned the ballroom as she spoke. "Look," she said, nodding toward the chaperones' area. "There is Leticia Parkhurst. Thirty-one, rich, tided, and yet she is not married. Her fault? She waited too long, and now no one wants her. And yet I happen to know that despite her sour looks, she is intelligent, witty, and once she has had a glass or two of wine, outrageously funny!"
    "But this is just the way things are," Arabella said, ever practical. "A woman only has so long to have children, and must marry young. And a woman must marry! What would we do if we did not marry?"

    "Paint, write, teach, doctor, soldier, travel, work, play—all the things that men are free to do without the constraints of womanhood. If only we were allowed! The pity is, that women like Leticia have been so inculcated with society's pressures, that she feels herself a failure for not marrying, as does her mother and all of our set."
    "And the other things men do without constraint?" Arabella could not help herself from asking, though she blushed at the turn her thoughts were taking.
    "You mean love? Or at least, making love?" Eveleen said, bluntly. "Would it not be lovely to do that without constraint, choosing whom one wanted, dallying here and there like the fat bumblebee drifting over the lovely flowers." She had a dreamy look on her face.
    Shocked to the core, Arabella gazed up at her friend. "I ... I do not know what to make of you when you speak like that. Eve."
    "Of course you do not. You have been indoctrinated into the belief that women have only one purpose, and that is to bear some man's children. We have no passions, no desires." Eveleen's handsome face was set and grim, her eyes no longer dreamy or mischievous, though a smile was still pasted on her lips. "If we paint, we are patted on the head and told how nice it is that we can dabble; if we are politically astute, our only recourse is to marry and bully our husbands into being our cat's-paw. Any hint of passion and we are condemned as loose. It is outrageous and unfair."
    "I did not know you to be so bitter, nor did I realize that you like men so little." Arabella felt a little of her world shift. People were so hard to read. She would have ventured to say that Eve, a woman she had known since her first Season four years before, was exactly what she seemed, a care-for-nothing flirt who enjoyed making her way through the London Season dancing and having a wonderful time. She had known from early in their acquaintance that Eveleen intended not to marry, but had viewed it as just some private quirk, and not a broad philosophy. But it seemed that there was some guiding principle to her life that Arabella did not understand. "With that feeling, I am surprised you wish to stay in London so badly.'*
    "Do you think I stay here for this?" Eveleen said, sweeping one graceful, gloved