If it were any other of the women in the ballroom who wore gowns as costly, doubtless they had heard the compliments several times by this point in the evening. There was a way of looking at such dresses and sizing up the cost, naming the designer, assessing the size of the woman inside it with a distant unpleasantness that wasn't Eve -- if she was unpleasant she was downright obvious about it, thank you with a side of sweetness.
It wasn't the first compliment, but it was the first one from someone who wasn't trying to sell her the dress and Eve was drawn away from diamonds and wealth and a take to make on the other side of the room and down to the woman on wheels -- was this the charity's grand cause? Trundle out a cripple in evening dress, everyone pull out the check-books? Eve was a hundred expressions in one face, splintering into one another like glass -- hard to read but not the way of a studied evader, more too many things to see when they were all stirred together.
"Thanks," and the word slid from her tongue, unfamiliar a shape and awkward in taste but said because within the cage and confines of a ball, you walked up to protocol and shook hands nicely, rather than starting a bar-fight. If the dress-code had permitted it, she'd be in leather pants.