The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (Montague Siblings, #2)

by Mackenzi Lee

But all I can think to say is a snappish And maybe someday the stars will fall from the sky.

Thank God for friends who learn to speak to you in your own language rather than making you learn theirs.

“Love has made you terribly soft, you know,” I say to him without looking. “I do,” he replies. “Isn’t it grand?”

Men like this never die—they’re chiseled in marble and erected in these halls.

You deserve to be here. You deserve to exist. You deserve to take up space in this world of men.

it’s hard to be raised in a world where you’re taught to always believe what men say without doubting yourself at every step.

“No one calls a girl spirited or opinionated or intimidating or any of those words you can pretend are complimentary and means it to be. They’re all just different ways of calling her a bitch.”

Am I having a stroke? Not only are all the words I wish to say putting themselves in a random order in my brain, but I’m almost certain my voice is far too loud and my movements far too exaggerated.

This is what I think eveytime I talk to someone.

It’s my whole childhood, being sneered at by watery girls for a joke I didn’t understand because I was reading books they could never understand.

It’s a queer thing, to have a vacant space inside you and not know what it is that carved out the absence.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I hate that I am apologizing to him when it is he who kicked me, he who has made me feel that I’m in the wrong for daring to ask for something. Not even something—for anything. He has me apologizing for asking for the minimum that is granted to most men.

Then I brace my feet against the casements and rescue myself.

But if I cannot always believe in myself, I can believe in Johanna. And Sim. And Sybille Glass and Artemisia Gentileschi and Sophia Brahe and Marie Fouquet and Margaret Cavendish and every other woman who came before us. I have never doubted the women who came before me or whether they deserved a seat at the table.