“Is he?” She’d too many times found herself the recipient of those carefree, charming rogues. She vastly preferred Gabriel’s dry humor and more reserved self.
“Alex is wed now,” Chloe said with a smile. “And quite reformed.” Jane doubted that. Once a rogue, always a rogue. “He wedded my dearest friend, Imogen.” Her grin dipped. “Which is why I find myself alone and unattached.” Some of her earlier cheer restored. “Though, I must admit, I expected this to be a lonely Season, Jane. I never expected I should find a companion who both reads philosophical books and would become a friend.”
Emotion suffused her heart. “A friend,” she whispered. In the course of her four and twenty years she’d never had a friend. As she’d said to Gabriel last evening, hers had been a solitary childhood and only all the more lonely the older she became.
“Yes, a friend.” Chloe gave her a look that could only come from another woman who herself had known if not the same, at least a similar solitary existence. She winked. “Even if you are one of Mrs. Belden’s dragons.”
Reality raised its ugly head. The truth of her deception, the lies she’d built her relationship with Gabriel and this young woman upon, shook, shaming her not for the first time with her being here under these false pretenses. She shifted on her seat and dropped her gaze to the book on Chloe’s lap.
A relieved sigh escaped her when Gabriel’s sister moved the conversation to safer topics. She held her copy of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters aloft. “I must confess I’ve been quite devouring your Mrs. Wollstonecraft.”
Jane would bet the whole of the trust coming to her in two months that the Marquess of Waverly would sack her faster than she could utter “scandalous teachings” for introducing Chloe to the philosopher. “Mrs. Belden would not be pleased,” she muttered to herself. After all it had been a sackable offense.
Chloe tossed her blonde head back and laughed. “Yes, I daresay the mother of the dragons would not tolerate such reading material.” Then some of her amusement slipped. “Though, I confess to my disappointment with Mrs. Wollstonecraft.”
“In what way?” Jane prodded when the young woman fell silent.
Chloe shrugged. “She is scandalous in her thoughts and beliefs on women and their role in Society and yet here,” she lifted her book once again. “Here she encourages women to wed.” Disappointment turned her lips down. “She suggests with her words that the only way a woman can contribute to Society is through that wedded state.” She tossed the book down on the table between them and caught her lower lip between her teeth. “Do you agree with that, Jane?”
Jane hesitated, knowing there were many ways in which to answer the question. The one in which she dutifully confirmed her ascent as Gabriel would likely wish. In that lie, she’d guide Chloe as he so wished, toward that estimable state of matrimony to some proper, powerful lord.
Or the truthful one.
She held Chloe’s gaze. “It matters not what I think but rather what you believe, Chloe.”
A wistful smile played on the young lady’s face. “You are the only one of Mrs. Belden’s instructors, my siblings, my mother, of anyone to say as much.”
What a confining world they both lived in. Jane lifted her hands up. “Society, your family, they think to protect you—us,” she amended. “They think to guide us to the perfect marital match.” Her first meeting with Gabriel reared in her mind. “Ultimately trusting that we should be cared for and they are wiser to know what we need. All the while they fail to see the truth.”
The young woman stared at her, frozen, hanging on to each word. She shook her head.
“The truth is we know our hearts and, more importantly, our minds. If a dog snaps and snarls at you, you’d not reach out to pet the thing. Even as Society thinks you will, without the proper guidance.”
An unexpected bitterness lined the young woman’s face, chilling in its rawness. It aged her beyond her twenty-one years. “Then, wouldn’t it be wiser to avoid all those creatures to avoid being snapped and snarled at?”