Yuan spent the better part of the morning trying to figure out how to casually interrogate a princess without it sounding like an interrogation, and by noon he had concluded there was no elegant way to do it. Every version he rehearsed in his head sounded either too suspicious or too strange, and a few of them sounded like something a man might say right before being escorted out of the palace by very polite guards.
So he did it inelegantly instead, on the theory that a bad plan executed with confidence was still better than a good plan he never worked up the nerve to attempt.
