“I didn’t mean to. I’m not such a fool as to have thought you would listen to me, for a moment. But it’s more than I’d reckoned on, having you in the house like this, and—and caring for you in the way I do.”
“Do you, really?”
“Yes, dear. Almost since that very first day I saw you at Squires.”
He drew a long breath.
“Couldn’t you, Rose?”
Rose Aviolet shook her head, and he saw tears in her brown eyes.
“I shan’t ever marry again. You don’t know what my married life was like. I suppose it’s a most awful thing to own up to, but after I’d been married to Jim six months, I used to think I’d rather be a widow than anything else in the world. He was in love with me, at first anyway, but do you think I was ever anything but a convenience to him? It was what he wanted, when he wanted it, how he wanted it, first and last. Some women may like it, if they’re the door-mat kind, but I’m not. And it wasn’t only that I was very young and self-willed and spoilt, and Jim more or less of a bad lot—which he was. I know what other marriages are like, too. There isn’t any freedom for the woman, only for the man. Why, Ford told me that it’s only the father that has any legal rights over his children at all.”
“It’s true,” said Lucian. “To the shame of those who tolerate it, the law of the land only acknowledges one parent for children born in wedlock, and that is the father. But can’t you trust me, Rose? I can promise you that it wouldn’t be a case of Jim Aviolet over again,” said the doctor rather grimly.
She shook her head again. “It isn’t that I don’t trust you. I even think you’d do better than any one for Ces. But I don’t hold with second marriages.”
The doctor ignored that pronouncement, which Rose had frequently heard employed by her mother.