"Oh, you've never married," Westboro' tried frankly to irritate him, "and you can't, you know——"
The sweet temper of the other accepted the Duke's scorn. "I'm not married, or very theoretical about it, either. One can only, after all, have his own point of view."
"We're not, I expect, fair to the women," the Duke generously acknowledged. "We look for so much in them. We expect them to be so much."
"A wife," Bulstrode completed for him, "a mother, a friend."
And Westboro' finished it. "For them and for other men. And a mistress."
And here Bulstrode took him up for the first time with a note of challenge in his voice.
"And what, my dear man, did you intend that the Duchess should take you for? No, I mean to say, quite man to man, given that any woman could or does contain all the qualities you so temperately ask?"
Westboro' smiled at the first curtness he had ever heard in his friend's voice.
"Oh, you know, we men don't fuss about ourselves."
"You married her at eighteen," Bulstrode said. "You made her a Duchess. You had already lived a life and she was a child beside you in experience. You required motherhood of her, and in return...."