Something Beautiful

Chapter - 39

Lisa, inexperienced at dealing with this high level of satire did not understand that such talk was considered trendy, so she faithfully defended the old woman she was starting to love. "It seems you're not very familiar with Her Grace."

"Oh, I'm familiar with him. And you got my deepest sympathies."

"I don't need your sympathy, My Lord, and you can't possibly know him well if you still talk that way about him."

The man looked at Lisa coldly. "I dare say I was close enough to her that she was often attacked by frostbite on several occasions. That old woman is really an ice queen."

"He is generous and kind!"

"You," said the man, smiling mockingly, "whether afraid to tell the truth or the most innocent girl in the world."

"And you," Lisa replied with the coldest gaze that must have received praise from her own grandmother, "either too blind to see the truth, or very very very evil."

At that moment the waltz music had stopped, and Lisa committed an unforgivable, and very blatant, insult by turning her back on the man and leaving him. Unaware that everyone was watching them, he returned to Yugyeom and the grandmother, but his actions had already attracted the attention of many guests, some of them immediately mocked the proud knight for not succeeding in seducing young Lady Kim.

In return, Jaehyun, the host, turned the bow to be the most ruthless threatener of the night and said from his brief introduction while dancing, he found the young Mrs Kim to be an unattractive, stupid, arrogant and very boring woman, who had no talk, was neither modern nor intelligent.

Within an hour alone, the innocent Lisa was rated by the guests as a truly foolish woman. He stood in the middle of a large group of elegantly dressed guests in their twenties to thirties. Some of the guests enthusiastically talked about the ballet show they watched last night as well as the stunning performance of Jung Una, the former mistress of Mingyu. Turning her head towards Yugyeom, Lisa raised her voice slightly to be heard among the commotion, then innocently asked if Mingyu liked ballet performances. Two dozen people immediately stopped talking and gasped at him with expressions ranging from shame to ridicule.

Mingyu once said that if Lisa made him think of the Gainsborough painting, Lisa recalled happily, but the two women were more worthy of being called the masterpiece of Rembrandt's class. Realizing that someone was talking to her, Lisa apologized for not paying attention, then turned her head towards the two women who had caught her attention.

"They're really the two prettiest women I've ever seen, what do you think?" lisa asked with a smile of admiration without the slightest hint of envy.

The group that surrounded him first looked towards the two women, then towards him. Their eyebrows shot up, their eyes widened, and fans began to lift to cover the amused smile. When the dance was almost over, four hundred people had already heard that Mingyu's widow admired Mingyu's former mistress. The gossip was so sanitary that people who had been hostile for years also laughed together again, they even seemed to laugh out loud together, like best friends.

Lisa is fortunately unaware of her mistake, but the longer she becomes aware people seem to secretly laugh at her. On the way home on the train, Lisa pleads for Yugyeom to tell her if he has made a mistake, but the man just pats her on the shoulder and calmly says he is a great success, while the grandmother thinks he has 'raised' his image.

Nonetheless, Lisa instinctively knew that something was not right. At dance parties, Venetian breakfasts, and music shows, the cynical glances directed at him become increasingly unbearable. Feeling tormented and confused, he seeks refuge among his grandmother's friends who, despite being decades older, don't seem to consider themselves ludicrous creatures, strange and sad as shown by the younger generation. It did not occur to Lisa at all that the middle-aged men, only respected her grandmother and only considered a girl who was so infatuated with her late husband that it was blind with around the man. And of course, this view will still be up to the younger generation who will make their assessment of Lisa worse.

Sometimes Lisa is invited to dance, but by a man who is interested in the large dowry that Yugyeom and his grandmother give to him, or by a man who just wants to taste the body of a woman who was married to the most famous playboy in all of London. Lisa felt, without knowing why, none of the men really liked her and did the only way she knew to hide her confusion and sadness, she said, that is by lifting his chin up high with a cold attitude then politely and firmly say he prefers to be with his grandmother's friends.

As a result, Lisa was nicknamed the ice queen, as well as various other bad nicknames. The jokes that circulated among the nobles said that Mingyu felt that it was better to drown to death than to freeze to death in his wife's bed. And it was fortunate that Mingyu was seen coming out of the mansion given to her beautiful mistress during the day after the announcement of her wedding appeared in the newspaper.

Moreover, it was reviewed at length with a slight mockery that Mingyu's mistress on the same night said to her friend with a laugh that Mingyu's marriage was only for 'practical' reasons' and the man had absolutely no intention of severing the secret relationship between them.

Within two weeks, Lisa sadly realized that she had been ostracized in the company but because she had not heard what they were talking about behind her back, she did not know why. All he knew was that the nobles treated him either with patronizing, amused or sometimes blatantly insulting. And he had failed miserably in bearing the name Mingyu. The latter was the one that hurt him the most. He spent hours in the corridor in front of the man's portrait, trying not to cry, inwardly apologizing for failing and begging the man to forgive him.