Re: Vauxhall Gardens
She looks at him as he speaks of his reasons for coming here, and there is enough of her girlhood self still residing in bones gone sapped of sweetness in the marrow to render her oblivious to the darker turns of his thought. For the girl stepping out of the glassed protection of the hothouse, this is but an adventure of a day. Harmless as those seaside jaunts she took with Vanessa, before the world went clouded, and before there was no longer a need for a brighter word than bright. She is smiles and beryl eyes, and she regards him with a fondly entertained equality, as a pet she has deemed worthy of being uplifted.
"My sympathies for your family. There is little opportunity to be found here without pedigree." She motions to the green beyond them, where only the most beautiful fashions are worn, and the Gardens are not public on this day. But she is with him, and so he is allowed, but their world is not kind to those who cannot converse prettily in sitting rooms. "Did it go dreadfully for them?"
Human flesh, and she should be repulsed, turned of stomach, and she is a little. But there is something behind that inexpressive girlishness that says she is not shocked to contemplate such horrors, not as she ought to be. "Nightmares can be vivid," she says, falling into step after a moment of lingering still. "The companion of my dreams felt there was truth to the nightmares, but I dream terrible things always." Ah, there, gone the girl from the seaside and something more somber in her place. "I no longer dream of ballrooms."