Extrait

(Dès que la traduction sort, je le remplace, mais on peut aussi le découvrir en anglais, enjoy !Note d'Everalice)

“If I had smiled and fawned over you at Lady Mannering’s ball,” she said, “and if I had simpered and giggled during the drive in Hyde Park, you would have lost interest in me in a moment, Lord Ravensberg.”

“Good Lord, yes,” he agreed. Perceptive of her.

“I would thank you not to take the Lord’s name in vain,” she said so primly that he was momentarily enchanted. “I see that I have behaved in quite the wrong manner with you. I should have encouraged you.”

“There is always time,” he suggested, moving his chair half an inch closer to hers, “to mend your ways, Miss Edgeworth.”

“You mock me,” she said. “You laugh at me—constantly. Your eyes never stop laughing.”

“Smiling,” he said. “You do me an injustice. My eyes smile with delight because every time they behold you they see a woman so beautiful that no one after her is worth looking at—or thinking of or dreaming about.”

He was enjoying himself enormously, he realized—and wooing her in quite a different way than he had planned, with a quite blatant lack of subtlety. But there was no conventional way of wooing this woman, he suspected.

“I rest my case,” she replied, a faint blush coloring her cheeks. “There is no common ground between us, my lord, upon which any sort of meaningful relationship might be built—if that is your intent. We are as different as night and day.”

“And yet night and day meet fleetingly at twilight and dawn,” he said, lowering his voice again and narrowing his eyes and moving his head a quarter of an inch closer to hers. “And their merging sometimes affords the beholder the most enchanted moments of all the twenty-four hours. A sunrise or a sunset can be ablaze with brilliance and arouse all the passion, all the yearning, in the soul of the beholder.” He grinned wickedly at her and touched his fingertips to the back of her gloved hand.

She moved her hand sharply away and then, seeming to recollect that they were on public view, raised it gracefully in order to fan her flushed cheeks. “I know nothing of passion,” she said. “You are wasting your time with me, my lord. I am not the sort of woman on whom words like these will have any effect whatsoever.”

“The theater is certainly overwarm,” he said softly, his eyes on her fan.

She ceased her movements abruptly and turned her head to look directly into his eyes. He expected her to move back when she saw how close they were, but she stood her ground, so to speak. He could sense anger hovering behind her control, and willed it to burst forth, even in this very public setting. Especially here, perhaps. They would instantly become a spectacular ondit. But he could almost see her reining in her temper before she spoke.

“You would be well advised not to continue pursuing me after tonight,” she said. “I will not accept any future invitation that includes you, my lord. I am accustomed to moving in circles where gentlemen are unfailingly gentlemanly.”

“How intolerably dull for you,” he said.

“Perhaps,” she said, plying her fan again, “I like a dull life. Dullness is much underrated. Perhaps I am a dull person.”

“Then perhaps,” he suggested, “you should marry someone like Bartlett-Howe or Stennson. Every time they move they are lost to view within a cloud of dust.”