The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics (Feminine Pursuits, #1)

by Olivia Waite

“They don’t let you have anything whole, you know. If you don’t follow the pattern. You have to find your happiness in bits and pieces instead. But it can still add up to something beautiful.”

When the kiss broke, the countess laughed a little, sounding surprised, and Lucy couldn’t blame her. She was beyond words herself. She wanted to sink her hands into the lady’s hair and hold her in place and kiss her until the sun went dark and the moon went dim and the stars blew out like spent wax candles.

She pulled off the stellarium shawl and stretched it out in front of them both. “Look at this. It’s sophisticated and striking and absolutely lovely. Anyone who sees it is dazzled—and the more they know about how it was worked, the more they take away from it. Everyone can admire the sparkle—but only another embroiderer can recognize the skill it took to create the design, and to make it a concrete reality. I told you once your stitches looked like brushstrokes—and I’ve spent enough time around artists to know a gifted eye when I see someone use it. Catherine,” she said more softly, “this is art. You are an artist.”

You could never sit back and let the official pieces of paper do the work for you, oh no: you had to choose the other person over and over again, every time. What’s worse, you had to trust them to choose you. It was horribly frightening—as though you started every day by reminding your heart to keep beating.

She ought to have paid more attention to her own self before now. She ought to have allowed herself to want things.

Every generation had women stand up and ask to be counted—and every generation of brilliant, insightful, educated men has raised a hand and wiped those women’s names from the greater historical record.”

Well, astronomers did spend most of their time being wrong. What mattered was what they did when they realized the truth.