She looked at him uncomprehendingly for a moment before flushing again and resuming her upright position in her chair. "Oh,” she said, “I see.”
“Do you?” he said.
Her eyes danced into merriment and she laughed again. “They are shockingly naughty,” she said.
“Yes, aren’t they?” he said. “They were chosen with great care.”
The earl was somewhat relieved when Mrs. Reeves bustled in at that moment with two dishes of steaming pudding on a tray. He really ought not to have encouraged this line of conversation. Mrs. Hunter was a lady.
She seemed to feel the same way. She began on another topic when Mrs. Reeves withdrew.
“Are you marrying for love?” she asked.
He was amused. “Why do you ask?”
“Because if you are,” she said, “it would seem to me that you would have wanted to break off with your mistress without bringing her here. And if you are not, I wonder that you are breaking off with her at all.”
No, perhaps the topic of conversation had not been changed, after all.
“Love is a woman’s invention,” he said. “Or rather being in love is. Women do not like to admit that they are swayed by a man’s looks and sexual appeal. It seems ungenteel to them to be taken with physical attraction. So they dress up their emotions prettily and call them being in love.”
“How dreadfully cynical,” she said, “and how wrong. My husband was in love with me. He adored me for the eight years of our marriage before he died. I was never in love with him.”
Lord Wetherby raised his eyebrows.
“I used to call him silly,” she said, “treating me as if I were a fragile doll and setting me on a pedestal as if I were not human at all but some sort of angel. I used to tease him about it, and he used to tell me that one day I would fall in love and I would understand him better.”
The earl forgot about his pudding. He was intrigued. Who was the poor fool who had made such an ass of himself?
She leaned forward again, a little more than before, so that he swallowed and returned his attention hastily to his plate. “I loved him, of course,” she said. “I loved him more than I ever loved anyone except perhaps Papa. I loved him dreadfully, though he always used to laugh at me when I told him so, and call me a foolish child and tell me I would know one day what it was like really to love.”
Her face, Lord Wetherby saw when she straightened a little and he dared to look at her again, was flushed and eager, her dark eyes large and very direct.
“We knew for three years that he was going to die,” she said. “I think he suspected even before that. He had a cancer.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That must have been unbearably distressing for a young man.”
“He was fifty-seven years old when he died,” she said. “But that is not old, is it? I wish he had lived another twenty or thirty years, I wish he had lived forever. I loved him, you see, though I was not in love with him at all.”
He looked at her curiously. He would have put her age at no more than two- or three-and-twenty, but she had been married for eight years and her husband must have been dead for longer than a year—she did not wear mourning. She was clearly older then she looked. But even so at least thirty years younger than her husband,
"Do you love her?” she asked. “Even if you are not in love with her, do you love her? Or will you be able to grow to love her?” She spoke quite earnestly and looked at him very directly, as if the answer mattered to her.
“I do not know her well,” he said, “though we have been acquainted for many years. But I do believe that marriage should be a total commitment, Mrs. Hunter. I will do my very best to come to care for her.”
“Good,” she said, picking up her spoon at last and tackling her pudding. “I am glad.”
He watched her with amusement.
“How did you come to marry Mr. Hunter?” he asked. “Let me guess. He was very wealthy and your family thought he was a good catch.” There was some cynicism in his voice.
“Wrong again,” she said, looking up at him with that bright smile that he was finding increasingly attractive. “He was not very rich, though we were quite comfortably well off. And Dennis just about had a fit when I told him Leonard was going to come to offer for me.”
The earl settled back in his chair, his wineglass in his hand, and regarded her with a half-smile.
“We were in Bath,” she said, “which is reputed to be a town for elderly people these days. But there were some young men there and they acted very silly, the lot of them, and made me dread even going outdoors—always sighing and saying the most outrageous things. Leonard used to come to my rescue and walk me about the Pump Room and sit beside me at concerts. I could relax with him.”
The earl was hard-put to it not to show open amusement. Most girls, he suspected, would have reacted in quite the opposite way.
