Chapter 6: Thornfield Abbey, by Invitation

The invitation arrived on a Tuesday, which Cecilia thought suitable. Tuesdays had always struck her as the day of the week most committed to the performance of normalcy.

The card was engraved rather than written — cream stock of an excellent weight, the address in a continental hand that managed to be both perfectly legible and entirely foreign. Count Vordescu of Thornfield Abbey requested the pleasure of the neighbourhood's company for an informal gathering of the kind the neighbourhood would recognise as a card party, though the word he used was soirée, and Mrs. Hartwell spent a considerable portion of Wednesday morning establishing whether this represented an elevation or a deflation in social register.

"It is French," she concluded finally, with the air of a woman who has successfully located the source of an infection. "Everything Continental is French at bottom. Cecilia, what does it mean precisely?"