[And Hubert meets that easy declaration with a laugh of his own. Short, brusque, the sort that bleeds into the night itself, but lacking the edge of any true dismissal.]

Presumptuous of you. But I wonder, then, if you hold your supposedly wonderful dancing skills in such high esteem that you believe you’d qualify as the “right” person to change my mind?

[Dancing about, making a show of it. Participating in superfluous traditions of high society and nobility, and all the ancillary circles that would hover in the same periphery — it all seems like a very Ferdinand thing to do, a man opposite to him in so many ways.]