Brat

Apparently having shown up to dinner dressed in jewelry signaled not only my sophistication gained in that decade timespan apart, but was also interpreted by Henry as a desire to impress him with the subtlety of my womanly wiles.

I love you. What guy loves a girl and doesn't notice everything about everything she does? It’s the quickest way to tell.

This would be a theme that would continue through our interactions over the course of the next week—every piece of jewelry, article of clothing, and scent of perfume interpreted by my friend as a signal of my affection (albeit subtle) for him.

His fixation and acute awareness of what had otherwise become my personal standard of grooming in a nonplussed city like New York, reminded me of a movie set in the Victorian era that I had seen in high school; a mature, worldly woman showing a coming-of-age girl the ways to attract a man or signal interest through the use of accessories and eye flutters.

In the days when women yet blushed, in the days when they desired to dissimulate this embarrassment and timidity, large Fans were the fashion; they were at once a countenance and a veil. Flirting their Fans, women concealed their faces; now they blush little, fear not at all, have no care to hide themselves, and carry in consequence imperceptible Fans.

-Madame de Genlis, Dictionary of Etiquette

In addition to the countless sonnets I had memorized, my stint in the all-girls school birthed an after school hobby of researching obscure but scandalous women during what I deemed to be the most hypocritical eras in history; Madame de Genlis was one of my favorites- having derived from an ancient but reduced family name Ducrest, the comtesse, reminded me that perhaps none of us are immune to that streak of family greatness that reduces us to interpretations of frivolity (this piece of work, as I type it being no exception to that).