Cicely and Gwendoline put their would-be suitors through their paces in The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde.
They met, they fell in love, they wed, they lived happily ever after. Where’s the story in that? We need conflict. We need challenges. In romance, we need courtships to go wrong.
So that’s the theme of this week’s invitation. Share an excerpt from your romance where a courtship is failing to take off, or is taking a wrong turn. Mine is from To Wed a Proper Lady.
When the other guests went up to change for dinner, James met Lady Sophia by the stables. He drove her over to the far corner of the estate, nearly a mile by the lanes, happily filling in the time by telling her the history of the Turkmen horse breed.
She asked interested and intelligent questions, which pleased him enormously. He’d love for his own passion for horse breeding to be something they could share. From his observation, couples who had at least some interests in common had better marriages and happier lives.
Should he hint at his desire to make her his wife? She must suspect by now, surely. He’d been careful to stay within the boundaries of an English courtship, as explained to him by his aunt: no more than one dance an evening, no steering straight to her side as soon as he saw her at any event they both attended, no singling her out without including her sister to give the appearance of propriety, no gifts beyond a polite note or a bunch of flowers. But within those constraints, he had been faithfully attentive for months.
And he’d sought her out in Cheltenham and organised this journey to spend time with her. Did that not tell her his intentions? Although she believed he was on his aunt’s errand.
In Para Daisa, his mother or another female relative would already have met with a female relative of hers. In England, he should, according to the courtship rituals Aunt Grace had described, call on the Earl of Hythe, the male head of the lady’s family.
Given Hythe’s attitude, such a meeting was unlikely to produce the results James needed.