“I will if you like, but it isn’t really what I think, or what Father thinks, that matters. It’s what you think yourself.”
Valeria stamped her foot.
“I don’t know what I think.”
“Better go away,” Lucilla then said briefly.
“Work?”
“Yes, if that’s what you feel like. Of course, marriage would be better.”
“Lucilla.”
“You asked me to say what I thought,” her sister pointed out.
“I suppose you mean Owen Quentillian,” Val said at last. “But even if I did that—and he hasn’t asked me to, so far—it would only mean just the same sort of thing, only in another house. There’d be servants to do the real work, and a gardener to do the garden, and a nurse for the babies, if there were babies. Owen talks about farming Stear, but he’d do it all out of books, I feel certain. We should be frightfully—frightfully civilized.”
“Owen is frightfully civilized.”