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“I am sorry. I am being glib and ungrateful at the same time, which is rather a feat, isn’t it? It’s just that this is my life. My world is small. By its very nature, the role of companion means subsuming one’s agency to that of one’s employer. But I take an odd sort of solace in reminding myself that I am not unique, that it is always this way for women.”

“What do you mean?”

“A wife is subservient to her husband. A mistress is subservient to her keeper.”

He made a vague noise that from anyone else she would have interpreted as disagreement. From him, she thought it might signal dismay.

“I admit I had never thought of it like that,” he said.

“Think of the words themselves. We say a man ‘takes’ a wife, as if she were a flower he may pluck at will. A gentleman ‘keeps’ a mistress, as if she were an animal in a cage.

“And before that, we do what our fathers want. They give us to another man to marry, transferring the title as surely as if we were a piece of land.

“And before you start pointing out the rare instances of employed ladies, those occupations have as their foundation service to others. Governesses. Teachers. Nuns. The only woman I know who has an interesting job is Lord Stonely’s wife. And she’s rather the exception, don’t you think?”

He was silent. She had said too much. He wanted to know about what inspired her to anger, and she had delivered a treatise on the role of ladies in society.

“Some women find genuine love,” he said quietly. “Clementine and Julianna did.”

She could make no argument there. “I suppose it’s different then. But your examples are not typical. That kind of love is rare. And it doesn’t change the nature of the arrangement, not elementally. A good husband might be a benevolent keeper, but he’s a keeper all the same.”

They were getting too off topic. She didn’t mind answering his questions, but she didn’t want to talk about love and marriage with him. “Back to the discussion at hand: I want things for myself, and not having them makes me so angry sometimes that I wonder if I am … defective somehow.”

“Don’t we all get angry at times?”

“I don’t know that we do. I’m talking about a terrible lot of anger. It’s very unseemly.”

“Is it, though? I am having trouble imagining it, picturing you so angry that you offend polite company.”

“You are correct, I suppose. It is more of an internal anger.”

“I am no expert, but I wonder if it isn’t better to let it out in some fashion.”

“I have been known to scream into my pillow in the dead of night.”

“Have you!”

“Don’t sound so delighted! I told you it was unseemly.”

“Perhaps you could hurl things at other things, in secret.”

“Things at other things? What do you mean?”

“Oh, I don’t know, plates at walls, perhaps. Would it not be satisfying to see them shatter?”

“I am sure it would be, but it is, of course, impossible.” Strangely appealing but impossible.

“Why impossible?”

“Where am I going to get plates I have leave to destroy?”

“Yes, I see the problem.”

“And even if I did have a stack of expendable plates, isn’t it wrong to destroy a perfectly good plate?”

“A fair question.”

“I suppose part of the reason I enjoy taking the waters,” she said, “is that it imparts some of the same wild, transgressive feeling I imagine would arise from your plate-smashing scenario.”