What happened then was inevitable.
But it was impossible to explain that to a fourteen-year-old girl when everything she had thought secure collapsed about her.
“How could Mama do such a thing? How could she?” Celesta had asked then and she asked it again now.
She remembered waiting for the invitations from her friends that never came.
“Lady Selton is giving a dance for her daughter’s fifteenth birthday next month,” Nana said soon after Lady Wroxley had run away. “You’d best be gettin’ yourself a new gown.”
“Yes, of course,” Celesta had replied. “I wonder that Elizabeth has not ridden over to tell me about the party. She was full of it when I last saw her.”
She could remember waiting day after day for the invitation that never came.
It was only the first of dozens of snubs and sligh
