When We Meet Again Read Free

good-natured humor. "We are well suited, cousin."
    "Indeed we are." Clarissa studied the foil thoughtfully. "But is it really necessary, do you think, for a woman to be skilled with a sword? It's not as if we should ever be forced to fight a duel for our honor."
    "I'm not certain a woman can ever have too many skills or too much knowledge. Besides, it stirs the blood, or at least mine, and is excellent for the body and the mind. And I, for one, find it both stimulating and quite enjoyable."
    Clarissa raised a brow. "You sound precisely like Aunt Millicent."
    "I'm not the least bit surprised as I quite agree with her about a great many things." Pamela handed her mask and foil to Monsieur Lucien, the fencing master, with a nod of thanks.
    "Of course you would." Clarissa handed her own things to Monsieur Lucien. "Fencing, doing anything women do not typically do, makes you more of an—"
    "Don't say it." Pamela's voice was firm. "I am not in the mood for yet another discussion of my character flaws." She started toward the grand entry in the ornate ballroom they had used for their fencing lesson. The ballroom occupied a good portion of the first floor of an impressive house in the very best part of Vienna that belonged to an Austrian count, an old and dear friend of Lady Smythe-Windom, their Aunt Millicent. Of course, there didn't seem to be anywhere in the world where there wasn't a very old and very dear friend of Aunt Millicent's. In all the years of their travel together, not one such friend of their aunt's had ever failed to invite them to stay for as long as they wished. It was a grand way to live even if, on occasion, the unsettled nature of their lives had bothered both Pamela and Clarissa. Still, it was what each woman had chosen for her own reasons.
    "Nonetheless. I am going to say it." Clarissa trailed after her cousin. "You like fencing and anything else that's unconventional and a shade scandalous because it's precisely what an Effington female would enjoy."
    "I am an Effington female." Pamela stifled a long-suffering sigh. Clarissa had brought this subject up over and over again in recent months and over and over again. Pamela had managed to deflect the discussion. She headed down the corridor that led to a series of salons designed for music and games and whatever else the residents of a house like this desired.
    "The flaw isn't in being what you are but rather in trying to be something you aren't." Clarissa called after her.
    "Indeed." Pamela muttered.
    It was easy for Clarissa to make pronouncements. She simply didn't understand and probably never would. Clarissa was Pamela's cousin on her mother's side and hadn't the least idea what it was like to be an Effington. Especially a quiet, reserved, shy Effington.
    Oh, certainly. Pamela's cousin Delia had been considered "quiet" until scandal broke around her head. And then Delia's twin sister Cassandra, who everyone thought was headed for the worst kind of scandal, well, wasn't.
    And of course, there was Pamela herself, whose behavior no one had ever worried about, who, at the advanced age of twenty, when she certainly should have known better, had fallen deeply and passionately in love with George Fenton, the son of Viscount Penwick. At least she had thought she had, and had, with rapt abandon and no consideration to the consequences, lost her virtue to him. It was, as her brothers had muttered in a dark and forbidding manner once her ruination was known, the quiet ones you had to keep your eye on.
    It wasn't simply her nature that had set Pamela apart from the vast numbers of Effington relations. She had never particularly looked like a member of the family, who were all in all an attractive lot, the women universally pretty, some of them quite beautiful, the men typically handsome and dashing. Pamela's mother, a beauty in her own right, had always staunchly declared her oldest daughter was simply late to bloom and would come into her own one day. And indeed,