“You are quite right,” she said. “Ididreact too hastily.”
He grinned at her.
“Did you give Hatchard a definite no?” he asked.
“Oh, I did,” she said, “but he insisted that he would do nothing until tomorrow. He wants the girls to attend interviews with their prospective employers.”
“Ah,” he said.
“I suppose,” she said, “I ought to give them the choice, ought I not?”
“If you trust their judgment,” he said.
She sighed again. “It is one thing we are at pains to teach,” she said. “Good judgment, reason, thinking for oneself, making one’s own decisions based upon sense as well as inclination. That is more than one thing. We try to teach our girls to be informed, thinking adults—especially the charity girls who will not simply marry as soon as they are out of the schoolroom and allow their husbands to do all the thinking for them for the rest of their lives.”
“That is not a very rosy picture of marriage,” he said.
“But a very accurate one,” she retorted.
They were walking beneath an avenue of trees that lined the pavement. Briefly Claudia raised her face to the branches and leaves overhead and to the blue sky and sunshine above.
“I will warn them,” she said. “I will explain that the Bedwyns, led by the Duke of Bewcastle, are a family that has enjoyed wealth and privilege for generations, that they are arrogant and contemptuous of all who are below them on the social scale—and that includes almost every other mortal in existence. I shall explain that Lady Hallmere is the worst of the lot. I shall advise them not even to attend an interview but to pack their bags and return to Bath with me. And then I shall allow them to decide for themselves what they wish to do.”
She remembered suddenly that both girls had actually stayed at Lindsey Hall with the other charity girls last summer for the occasion of Susanna’s wedding. They had actually met the Duke and Duchess of Bewcastle.
The Marquess of Attingsborough was laughing softly. Claudia looked sharply at him. And then she laughed too.
“I am a tyrant only when I am wrathful,” she said. “Not simply annoyed, butwrathful. It does not happen often.”
“And I suspect that when it does,” he said, “it is because someone has threatened one of your precious girls.”
“Theyareprecious,” she told him. “Especially those who have no one to speak up for them but me.”
He patted her hand again, and she suddenly realized that she had been walking with him for several minutes without paying any attention whatsoever to the direction they took.
“Where are we?” she asked. “Is this the way back to Susanna’s?”
“It is the long and the best way home,” he told her. “It passes Gunter’s. Have you tasted their ices?”
“No, I have not,” Claudia said. “But this is themorning.”
“And there is some law that states one can indulge in an ice only in the afternoon?” he said. “There will be no time this afternoon. I will be at Mrs. Corbette-Hythe’s garden party. Will you?”
Claudia winced inwardly. She had completely forgotten about that. She would far rather stay at home, but of course she must go. Susanna and Frances expected it of her, and she expected it of herself. She did not enjoy moving intonnish circles, but she would not absent herself from any entertainment just because she was self-conscious and felt she did not belong.
Those things were all the more reason to go.
“Yes,” she said.
“Then we will stop for an ice at Gunter’s this morning,” he said, patting her hand once more.
And for no reason at all, Claudia laughed again.
Where had her anger gone? Had she by any chance beenmanipulated? Or had she just been given the benefit of the wisdom of a cooler head?
Wisdom?
The Marquess of Attingsborough?
