Eleanor didn't quite agree with the term 'relationship'. Blair lived in a fantasy world to some extent and that was fine most of the time. Crafting masquerades and trying to garner her boyfriend's attention were perfectly legitimate distractions from her studies. She suspected this thing with Chuck was driven by raging hormones and little else.
Then again, there was a chequered history of hormones being overwhelming in their family, leading to much more permanent arrangements. Henry Astor the Fifth, Eleanor's oldest uncle, had been born exactly six and a half months after his parent's marriage. Eleanor had seen with her own eyes the newspaper announcement that declared him a very loved honeymoon baby.
She'd also been there at her uncle's fortieth birthday. Her grandpapa had loudly guffawed that he fathered the largest, most-full-term looking baby ever ejected from a womb before the seven-month mark. Seven-year-old Eleanor had not quite understood the tittering that filled the room and looked about at the party guests confusedly. Mamére had pinched Grandpapa, her modest cheeks flushing in utter embarrassment before the assembled crowd of glitterati. But Grandpapa – Henry Astor the Fourth – his hands had publicly wandered Diana Astor's slim figure long after she'd given birth to that heir and society had become immune to forty years of their unhidden caresses. It was no secret he still pleasured her in her bed at night. The rumour that he had done so before they had a bed to call their own was no surprise to anyone forty years on.
Chuck Bass was not a stayer. Blair would not be subsumed into the Bass family because she let her hormones run wild for a season and inadvertently trapped herself. Eleanor would make sure of it.
What she fully supported was the overt disgust Bart put into his pronouncement that would make it clear to their children. The mogul had plans to groom Chuck for a place in his company. There was no way the Bass heir could dedicate time to commitment for a woman if he wanted to be like his father. It would have been possible seventy years ago to live a life with both, but the world had changed and successful men no longer had the time to properly love their women. She'd learned that first hand.
Blair would not be the one left behind, doing all the relationship work and letting her own life go to waste.
Eleanor had even loftier goals for her daughter. To be free of the whispers and stares that abounded at every fashion show and every cocktail party her mother attended. To keep her high and mighty and judge the models, rather than be judged by them. To be a Diana Astor who rescued the family name from ruin, and not a Harold Waldorf who brought about its fall.
Their family had sustained quite enough ill-judgement to last them a few lifetimes. And even a whisper that she'd been with Chuck Bass would make Blair into a Serena Van Der Woodsen of this world – hoping to attend Brown like the brainless dropout she was and aspiring to one day buy a Soho loft.
"We're not in a relationship," Blair vehemently protested, the word laced with as much disgust as Bart had intoned.
Eleanor rolled her eyes, not wanting to discuss the clearly physical bonds the two were exploring, but not liking Blair's innocent act either.
"Oh please," she rejected, reaching for her wine glass. "I have seen Charles leaving this apartment looking dishevelled three evenings in a row. Are you telling me it's a coincidence that Dorota is suddenly remaking your bed with fresh sheets every day?"
Blair screwed up her face in disgust. Good. Make her think about how she would like that dirty laundry aired in much larger company and let her consider the consequences. She had to drive home to her daughter just how much this inappropriate relationship would ruin her already precarious reputation. It wasn't her fault her father was a whore but she had to live with the consequences he had delivered to them all.
"It's not what you think," Charles inexpertly tried to dodge.
Eleanor glared at the boy, thinking that Bart really needed to guide him more clearly if he was ever going to move into a world where business deals hinged on the subtlety of a few choice words.
The father at this table levelled his only son with a glare and harshly vetoed the interjection. "With you it's always exactly what I think. I bought you that club with plenty of available women. Go there if you need company."
Yes she'd heard about his burlesque club. Further evidence that her daughter and what was left of her good name should stay well clear of the corrupting hedonist.
"What would your friends think of this?" Eleanor stressed to Blair, bringing on her part of the double-team. "I doubt Nate would be very fond of his ex-girlfriend and his best friend sneaking around. In my apartment."
Blair was going to be a Vanderbilt. And while Nate Archibald's branch no longer carried the family name, she'd started to think that the shame of the Captain's disgrace might prompt Nate to adopt his mother's prestigious name. Blair was smart, and could be incredibly driven. In the Vanderbilt clan she could move into an already established political machine and really do something with her life.
Instead of gallivanting around town with New York's most badly parented sixteen year old and losing her own good name in the process.
Not every bad boy could be rescued and made to settle down. Unfortunately Eleanor worried that it might be in Blair's DNA to think she should try. Exploits from Grandpapa's wild youth lay hidden in microfilmed newspaper pages at the New York Public Library. She knew, because on a rainy Saturday in prep school she'd slipped down there to sneak a peak, only to blush in disbelief at the reported acts of her grandfather's youth.
Then they'd cleaned out Mamére's apartments after her death, and it became clear that the matron of society's taste hadn't so much tamed the bad boy as channelled all his creative efforts into their well-used marriage bed. If the boxes of props weren't enough of a hint then the very explicit love letters he'd written her spelled his longing out word for hedonistic word.
She saw Chuck's suit fabric twitch slightly and turned her pointed glare on him.
"You can remove your hand from my daughter's leg," she instructed.
Both young people looked immediately guilty and she saw Chuck's arm move, slowly withdrawing. Eleanor was satisfied that they might be getting somewhere and looked back to Blair, only to watch her disobedient daughter clutch his upper arm and hold it still.
"No," she bit out harshly.
"Don't take that tone with me," Eleanor was affronted.
Maybe some harsher parenting needed to be happening here too. She was utterly ashamed that it had gotten this far, that her daughter had taken up with this scoundrel. Who was now going to ruin her. Bart was a friend but honestly. He was the worst parent the Upper East Side had seen in decades. He needed to get control of his rebellious son before it hurt Bass Industries as well. She couldn't help but notice the pinstriped arm returning to an angle that meant his lecherous hand was on Blair's leg.
Disobedient teenagers!
"If I want him to touch me then I'll have him touch me," Blair snapped back.
Her arm wound around Charles and encouraged the playboy to keep his hand far too intimately on her leg.
Eleanor swallowed harshly. No good could come of this. Grandpapa had been poor in the beginning but within society's constraints he had maintained his reputation flawlessly – it was what allowed him to convince Diana's mother he would be an acceptable husband.
That and the insurance he'd firmly planted in her belly first.
But this was different. "You don't do relationships," Bart stepped in again, trying to address his son.
The dark eyed devil was visibly coveting her daughter with a hungry gaze and barely acknowledged that his father had even spoken.
"You're going to end up hurting her. Do you want to ruin your friendship?" Bart finally seemed to give up on his previous attempt and tried a slightly different approach. Eleanor silently applauded him, because if Chuck was actually misguided enough to believe he was in a relationship with Blair, then maybe his feelings could be used to break them apart.
For a moment it worked, the two of them seemed to stop and genuinely think. Not for long enough though. They stared into one another's eyes like star-crossed lovers and then shared a secretive smile.
She wanted to reach over and slap the both of them out of it.
"It's already ruined," Blair countered softly.
Their eyes were locked for the longest silence. Then that boy leaned in and softly kissed her only daughter.
Eleanor's eyes widened in disgusted surprise. Oh no, this was not where Blair was headed. Diana Jones may have been Blair's great-grandmother, and she may have once risked everything by marrying Henry Astor only to have it end in their happily ever after, but no way was Blair, the descendant of so many great families, having anything to do with a Bass!
"Stop that," she clapped her hands, like they were disobedient animals rutting at the dining room table. "Immediately."
God if that boy touched her a second longer who knows what he could do. Eleanor felt like just a wanton look was powerful enough to make him the father of the next generation of Waldorfs.
"You realise you're just making this hotter, by making it forbidden?" the arrogant teenager drawled, never taking his lecherous eyes off her daughter. "If we wanted to we could just have sex at school. There's nothing you could do to stop us."
"Chuck!" Blair protested.
Apparently that one went too far, even for her.
"Stop it," his father had harshly cut him off at the same time.
Eleanor had moved beyond her disgust and now felt she was going to be sick. It was one thing to watch a notorious playboy leaving the apartment where your seventeen-year-old daughter was home alone of an evening. Quite another to hear it confirmed in plain English from said playboy's very own mouth.
Especially when her seventeen-year-old daughter flushed a hot pink and in that second looked the spitting image of her fiery great-grandmother. There was a photo taken just after grandpapa finished at Harvard, when they hadn't yet been engaged but she was twenty-one and embarrassed by knowledge no unwed lady should have. Add a cloche hat and parasol and Blair could be Diana Jones.