“Men do not wish to rule over women,” I said, feeling frustrated at that statement.
Richard shook his head at me again. I paid him no mind.
“Do they not?” said Miss Bennet, rounding on me. “For is there not always the edict to respect one’s husband and to think of him as the head, that his is the final word on everything?”
“Well, this is only because it’s the natural order of things,” I said.
“Yes,” said Miss Bennet, “and as Lady Susannah has said, we do not live in a very natural world any more, do we?” She gestured around at the surroundings of the sitting room, and I had to admit we were surrounded by man-made objects, constructed entirely for our comfort.
“We have grown soft, yes,” said Richard quietly. “All of us, men and women. We have grown soft, and we are not connected to the whims of the natural world, not every day. But nature is strong and tenacious and nature pulls us into them. Nature always reasserts itself.”
“How do you suppose that is true?” said Lady Susannah.
“Well, there are a number of ways,” said Richard. “But I suppose I was thinking primarily of war. No matter how civilized and soft we make ourselves, when it comes to disputes, we cannot solve it any other way besides killing each other.”
Everyone was quiet.
Richard cleared his throat. “Apologies. I have brought a halt to the conversation.”
“It is men who wish to do that,” said Lady Susannah. “Women do not solve conflicts by killing each other.”
“Perhaps not,” said Miss Bennet, “but perhaps they would if they had the strength for it.”
“No one is using strength to kill each other in the war,” I said. “They are all using weapons. I daresay a woman can fire a gun as easily as a man.”
“Oh, no,” said Richard with a smile. “Take that back, Darcy. Women have a natural aversion of guns, as we all know.”
Lady Susannah leaned forward. “But we are now back to the beginning of the conversation, I think, wherein we wonder if women need men. And here, I suppose, is my truest answer, Colonel Fitzwilliam. I think that some women need men, I do. But not all of them. It is all right for those of us who don’t to have our place in society.”
“Yes, and your companion,” said the colonel. “She is among those who don’t need men?”
Miss Bennet looked up at him. “I am.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
On the carriage ride back from Trawlings, I was flummoxed. “You would not let me speak!”
“You spoke far more than I think was wise,” said the colonel, looking thoughtfully out the window. It was not to be a long carriage ride back to our house.
“You started by having some stupid conversation about the weather and then you suddenly steered us right into a fierce argument,” I said.
“You are very stupid about conversation, are you not? That is how a conversation is conducted. You do not skip right to the thing you want to discuss. You must warm people up, gain their trust, show them you are not frightening. If you do not do this, they will find you a threat and they will not tell you what you want to know.”
I considered this. I had not ever quite thought about it that way, but I could see that he might be correct. “I wish you would stop saying that I was stupid,” I sulked.
“Stop being stupid, then!”
“Why are you here with me at all if you find my company so unbearable?”
He rolled his eyes. “You are womanish sometimes, Darcy, unable to take a bit of ribbing.”
“You have yet to explain why you provoked them both.”
“I was attempting to understand how this aversion to marriage works. We had heard that Lady Susannah was forbidding Miss Bennet to get married, and then we discovered this was false. But rumors like that often have some bit of truth nestled into them, and I wanted to see how deep it goes. In this case, it seems that Lady Susannah is quite the crusader for independent women, and she does seem to wish to mold Miss Bennet into her own image. I wanted to see how strongly such ideas had taken root in Miss Bennet.”
“Rather strongly, it seems,” I muttered.
“Yes,” he said.
