"I was completely, deeply committed; I hadn’t been able to take my eyes off Esmond all weekend. I had watched the Scotts succumb to his extraordinary charm, like trees slowly falling before the wind. Although Esmond was the youngest person in the party, he had seemed like a star around which everything revolved. A wind, a star, he represented to me all that was bright, attractive and powerful, and I did wonder what he thought of me. There had been one slight indication; one night the party at Cousin Dorothy’s had played a primitive sort of parlor game, then popular, in which each guest gave the others marks for various qualities — beauty, sense of humor, intelligence, sex appeal and so forth. The scores were added and announced, and the papers kept anonymous. Terrified of being discovered, I had gone down in my dressing gown after everyone else was asleep to salvage the crumpled sheets from the wastebasket. I discarded two neatly penned papers as Scott products; another, in a spidery and old-fashioned hand, must be Cousin Dorothy’s; and I recognized my own. That left an untidy penciled scrawl, in which I had got straight “10’s” — the top mark. This must be Esmond’s paper. Other than that I had no clue."
—
Jessica Mitford,
Hons and Rebels
