No, that's not correct Daphne. In fact you must bow first then extend your hand to greet, not the other way around. Yes- very good, my love. No! Gently, please. Do not shake like you're some small shivering rodent or a caffeinated outback cowgirl from America. Yes, perfection, my angel. Perfection.
Perfection. Perfection. Perfection.
Daphne could still hear her mother's voice reverberating from wall to wall on the inside of her skull. She zipped herself into a pair of dark jeans and a white silk shirt. She turned to leave her room, ready and packed to start another year at school. In all honesty, she was quite ready for a vacation away from her ivory tower of sorts. From birth, it was understood that she, above all others, was to bear the burden of becoming the paragon of pure-blood status that her mother was all those years ago. The kind of woman that won the hearts of men like her father, the youngest and handsomest of the Greengrass family.
Her younger sister, Astoria, was not allowed to slack, by any means; but as the first born in the next link of the long chain of propriety and wealth and status borne by the Greengrass name, Daphne was to serve as example.
And serve she did. She was taught how to dress, how to behave, how to speak, what to read, how to greet, to eat, to drink, to sit, to stand...how to be. No one understood pressure like she did, and in spite of it all she thrived. Her lessons became routine, and grew easier with each passing day. She was complemented on her manner, decorum, and dress with each passing dinner, gala and ball.
The war changed much of that. No longer were high families among the Sacred Twenty Eight flaunting there wealth. Instead they were spending quiet evenings at home, relishing their moments together and gazing through their crystal windows at the carnage that ensued beyond the gates of their own microcosmic world. Daphne just sat at her vanity table by the window of her third floor bedroom, brushed her blonde curls slowly, and watched as one muggle after the next was dragged, screaming in anguish down the streets to their imprisonment and eventual demise. She tried to feel something for the poor creatures that drug along the pavement outside of her family's estate, but she found she could not. Her eyes glazed over and her mind filled with some useless notes on place settings in her mother's sing-songy voice.
That was then. The war was now over, and judging by her mother and father's behavior, the world was supposed to just keep on turning. Her mother went back to arranging dinner parties and her father returning to scouring the remaining pure-blood market for suitable gentlemen to marry to his daughters. The summer had been another of touring the male society circuit for both Daphne and Astoria, and for the most part, they fell right into step.
Daphne was ready for a change. She missed the days when the war would keep her family close and honest, though she knew the informality of it all must have killed her mother. Somehow, Daphne knew that without school she would miss her last opportunity just to be a girl, just to be young. She was going to make the most of her time away from home, even if it meant getting fake-pregnant for a school project to accomplish that end.