“But you were arguing with me.”
“I was questioning your reasoning. That is different from disagreeing with your conclusion. I am in love with my wife. I would not have it any other way, and I would not have either of my sisters settle for less.” He glanced at Cecily beside him with the private look that Isadora had often watched pass between them, the look of someone who had made the best decision of their life and knew it every day. “I simply think the sentiment benefits from more than periodic reaffirmation.”
Letitia stared at him. “William, that was almost romantic.”
“Do not make it strange,” he muttered.
She blinked. Then she turned to Isadora with the expression of someone who needed a witness. “He agreed with me.”
“He agrees with you more than you think,” Isadora said. “You simply expect him not to, so you stop listening before he finishes.”
“That is—” Letitia paused. “Possibly accurate.” She looked back at William. “All right, you support the position. Good.” She smoothed her napkin with the energy of someone recalibrating. “James, what do you think?”
James looked up from his pheasant with the expression of a man who had been hoping to be excluded from the conversation. “About what?”
“Love,” Letitia said. “Marriage for love. William has declared his position. I have declared mine. You are the only one at this table who has not.”
“I was enjoying the pheasant.”
“The pheasant will not disappear. What do you think?”
James set down his fork with the slight resignation of a man accepting the inevitable. He reached for his wine and looked at the table for a moment, as if deciding how much truth to put into the room.
“I think that love is an excellent reason to begin a marriage and a very unreliable one to sustain it,” he replied.
Letitia frowned. “That is bleak.”
“It is realistic.”
“It is the same thing dressed differently.”
“People fall in love with some frequency,” James said, with the patience of someone making an argument he had made before. “They fall out of it with equal frequency. What holds a marriage together over twenty years is not the feeling that began it. It is something more like…” He paused. “Architecture. Structure. Shared purpose.”
“Architecture,” Letitia repeated, in the flat tone she used when something had offended her.
“You find that cynical.”
“I find it deeply depressing, much like every marriage in the ton,” she scoffed. “You are describing a building, not a marriage.”
“Buildings last.”
“So do bad marriages,” Letitia pointed out. “That is precisely the point.”
William, Isadora noticed, was looking at James with a slight frown.
“James,” he said.
James looked at him.
“What holds my marriage together is not architecture. It is Cecily. Specifically. Irreplaceably. The feeling has not gone. It has changed… It is quieter than it was, less…” He seemed to search for the right word. “Less urgent, perhaps. But it is not less. It ismore, if anything. It has more history in it. More weight.” He looked at his wife, and something in his face opened in the way it only did when he looked at her. “I could not construct a building adequate to what I feel for her. The architecture would collapse.”
The table was very quiet.
Isadora picked up her cup to mask her smile.
Cecily was looking at her husband with an expression that had nothing composed about it, the way she looked at him when she forgot other people were in the room.
That was exactly what Isadora wanted.
