The Gentleman's Gambit (A League of Extraordinary Women, #4)

by Evie Dunmore

He cleared his throat, but his voice was still rough: “You hold men in low regard.” She tilted her head, as if considering it. “No,” she then said. “I find the human species as a whole rather disappointing.” A laugh escaped him. “Equal misanthropy for all,” he said, “fair and just.”

until the current her was irretrievably gone. There would be no photograph, no one else’s memory, to preserve this version of her in time. It sickened her to even have this notion, that she did not really exist unless another person carried a lasting impression of her. The price a woman paid for her peace was oblivion,

The way he went quiet said he knew at once what she meant. “Ta’abrinee,” he said. “Yes.” “It means, bury me.” “Isn’t that a bit morbid?” He stroked the back of her hand with his thumb. “We say it to someone we don’t want to live without. Hence, we must go first.”

“Goodness, I employ two—it’s hardly a job for just one person. It’s the three of us. Mothering is work, Hattie, and you lobby every day for workers to have sufficient rest.”

“What even is naturalness? If it’s defined as ‘it has always been this way,’ then having others care for your children is as natural as breathing. Blimey, most women in Britain work out of the house six days a week to feed their families—have generations of farmers and seamstresses and miners done it wrong all along?

It just strikes me as yet another trick to direct every moment of a woman’s time toward something or someone outside of herself, and to fill her with guilt when she doesn’t.”

“You want me to command you to stop flitting about,” he said, “so you don’t have to feel guilty for making that choice yourself?” “I’m a grown woman,” she muttered. “I can make that choice. All right. Command me.”

We were separate creatures, of course, but from the beginning, we were also extensions of each other.” He looked at her quite sharply then. “Let me be clear: if you found a love like that, I would expect you to marry. I would expect it for your own good. But as long as our finances permit it, I could never ask you to yoke yourself to a pale imitation of what your mother and I had.