My Pleasure by Connie Brockway Read Free Book Online

and Helena sighed.
    The beauty that everyone so often remarked upon had seemed to Helena to appear overnight in her sixteenth year. Then, as now, her “beauty” had never felt…well, real. Unprepared for the sudden and overstated attention, she had retreated behind her natural composure. People, she had discovered, loved aligning themselves with pretty things—too often without thought or concern for what the veneer they idolized might shelter.
    Even her sister Kate seemed to consider Helena’s poise an indication of a dearth of inner resources. She had certainly never asked Helena’s aid or opinion after their parents’ deaths but had simply assumed command of their remaining family. And Helena, unwilling to further burden her already overextended sister, had unhappily let her life be directed by her. Until Lady Tilpot. Until she had found an opportunity to put to good use years of perfecting a graceful reticence.
    “I want to be just like you, Helena,” Flora was saying, her big eyes wide and earnest. “I want to be admired and respected and—”
    “Flora!” Helena broke in sharply. “I am not respected. I am fashionable. It is not the same thing. Not at all.”
    Flora’s brow puckered in consternation.
    Helena had little hope Flora would understand. Security, family, her station in life, her celebrated beauty, all of the things that Flora had and that at one time Helena had possessed, too, had proven illusory.
    Her much-vaunted beauty? After her mother’s death she had grown so gaunt only pitying gazes followed her. Her status? Vanished with the entailed estate. Security? Died with her father. Her family? Scattered to the winds, Kate following the drum on the Continent with her new husband, Colonel Christian MacNeill, and Charlotte unofficially adopted into a family of scapegraces and rattle-pates.
    Helena had no control over the vagaries that had molded her life, but she did control how she reacted to them. An impecunious orphan could find a good deal of satisfaction in that. Still, she must try to discourage Flora from the course she had followed.
    “When one has a certain degree of beauty, little else is expected of one. And even only a moderately pleasant disposition, which would normally not draw any attention at all, in a pleasing-looking person is given the status of a virtue. Which is hardly wise, is it?”
    Flora regarded her blankly. Subtlety had never worked with her.
    “Flora, people expect little of a pretty girl. But that does not really matter. What matters is this: When there are few expectations made of one, one begins to have few expectations of oneself. Therein lies the danger. One might settle for being less than one might otherwise be.”
    “But you are perfect!” Flora declared, and then her gaze fell and her lower lip extended in a pout. “Or you used to be.”
    “Hardly.”
    “But lately,” Flora continued as if Helena had not spoken, “well, it grieves me to have to say this, but you have become positively hardhearted!”
    At this Helena nearly laughed. If she had been hard-hearted, she would have flown from this house a month ago on the prospects of the portion Kate intended to give her of the huge treasure she and her husband had found in Scotland. Only two things kept Helena from going to the bank, arranging a loan—which she had been told by her brother-in-law’s representative would prove no problem—buying her own house, and retiring to live in a modest but extremely comfortable style.
    The first was that the last four years had taught her to be wary of anticipated windfalls. Her only current income was from Lady Tilpot, and as miserable as she was, she paid well for the privilege of tormenting her staff. The second and more important reason was that she felt responsible in part for Flora’s current predicament, she felt she owed it to the girl to stay and try and rectify the situation.
    So she had not investigated getting a loan. Indeed, she hadn’t even told