Portrait of a Scotsman (A League of Extraordinary Women, #3)

by Evie Dunmore

“Aye,” he murmured. “Then I’ll give you the tour, Miss Jones.” His fingers curved around her nape, and then his mouth was on hers.

Politics was made in private back rooms, after dinners, during grand tours.

“There is a sense of recognition,” she tried again, “between the artist, whose art embodies a universal experience, and the personal experiences of the observer. A moment of strangers’ minds meeting?”

Just assume people are chiefly motivated by convenience, vanity, or greed. Any product serving those will be a commercial success.”

“They do say capitalism worships only itself.”

“Then you think tragedy enchanting?” She returned his stare with a small pucker between her brows. “I think everyone should have at least one person they love well enough to die for.”

Worse, the things one had learned early often felt instinctual, as unquestionable as the act of breathing, and the familiarity of them mattered rather than whether they were good or harmful.

“I would never think you feeble-minded. But a husband could stop my research—the expectations are that I serve him how he sees fit.”

“At least there’s no grand expectation that you die for him if required.” “Death is but an instant,” Catriona said softly. “You, however, would be asked to live your one life for him.”

this compulsion to say one thing while thinking another, to agree to things one disliked, to laugh about jokes that were dull—

Quite sensible, actually, but when all suffered the same ill, the healthy ones appeared abnormal.

But perhaps every woman had known a moment when she felt as though she were drowning, and the only comfort was that there could be some beauty, some dignity, in that, too.

His mouth softened. “I don’t trust in anything, Miss Greenfield,” he murmured. “But if I did, I’d put my faith in the future, not the past.”

“Why does the world insist that substance worthy of acclaim always comes in the shape of machinery or old men?”

she couldn’t help but think that this was how Persephone would be dragged into the underworld in 1880s London: not screaming, not twisting wildly, but painfully composed while Hades wore a velvet jacket.

“In the church today … when I saw you, I thought you were the prettiest lass I’d ever seen.”

“Because impatience is one of my many vices.

Fairy tales express our hopes, not reality. The tale of women being tied to men they don’t want is as old as time, so of course we want hope. However, the reality is, a woman’s martyrdom will not change a man who doesn’t wish to change.

“Had Beauty been a man,” she said, “he wouldn’t have hesitated to kill the Beast rather than fall in love with it.

“Like no other, they inspire in a man the desire to please them,” Ballentine continued. “Pesky, this urge to see them happy, but there we have it—care nothing for their happiness, and you’re hurtling toward a cold, cold hell of your own making.”

Now she knew why girls were not allowed to feel anger—there was a reckless hope in it, and power.

How convenient for men as a group that the misdeeds of a few elevated each one of them to the status of protector and rendered women dependent on them,

‘What are men to rocks and mountains?’”

Mr. Blackstone better have the decency to go elsewhere—preferably straight back to his empty throne in the land of the dead.

“Much that I despise,” he said hoarsely, “and all that I desire, meets in you. And it frustrates me beyond reason.”

“I don’t know how to do this right,” he murmured. He took off his hat and tossed it aside. “I don’t know what to make of you. I know I’d rather my skin burned than yours.”

But laws are only ever as good as the will to enforce them.”

“Oh, how frustrating,” she said, “to keep a woman’s wages low to soothe a man’s vanity.” “It’s not just vanity,” he murmured. “Cruelty, then.” “For some it’s that. Mostly, though, it’s pride—” “Pride!”

“I suppose injustice in one place is usually linked to injustice elsewhere,”

“But working on improving one ill doesn’t preclude paying attention to another, I’m certain of that.”

the passionate part of her desired him exactly for who he was. But while she wanted the heat, would she have the strength to suffer the burn?

She had given thought to her smile lately, because she had consciously withheld it from her (then) undeserving husband, and it had occurred to her that she smiled more often to preempt someone else’s displeasure than to express her joy. Any remotely self-determined woman should claim control over the curve of her own mouth.

“I’d put you over my knee all right,” he murmured, the velvet of his lips soft against her ear. “But you would have to ask me for it, and nicely so.”

It seems that labor, once it crosses the door into a home, is magically transformed into a priceless act of love or female duty—meanwhile, women’s hands are raw from very real chores.”

A dark emotion was banking in his eyes. “I’ve known hunger,” he said. “And I have never been as starved as I am for you.”

“I was a sanctimonious toad,”