He leaned forward, a little riled up himself. “If it works so well, then why do we have an entire small town of gulden women who have run away from their fathers and their husbands, living in poverty on the fringes of the city? I must assume no one gave them any kurkalo to make that journey, wouldn’t you agree? Or do you think they should have stayed in Geldricht, living in whatever conditions were so intolerable they forced the poor women to run in the first place? I don’t claim to know much about the gulden lifestyle, or gulden men, but I know a fair amount about indigo men and women, and let me tell you, there are a few of them that I wouldn’t want to be tied to for life with no recourse and no hope of escape. I would have to imagine there are plenty of gulden who make lousy husbands and fathers, and that there are plenty of gulden women who would rather die than spend another day in their company. And you’re telling me that that’s a system that works well?”

He had hit on it exactly; he had put into words much of what she hated about the feudal, patriarchal gulden society. He could not know how she spent her days, trying to empower those escaped gulden women. He could not know how slowly and carefully she had worked, when she last lived on Gold Mountain, to institute change and press for laws that would give gulden women some legal rights.

“You’re right. The system is not perfect,” she said stiffly. “And for just the reasons you state. But you should not so smugly discredit it when you do not know why it was set up in the first place and how well it works much of the time.”

“I’m just amazed,” he said, “that any woman would agree to such a situation. The women I know would poison a man in his sleep before they would agree to be chattels. Or—no—nothing so passive. They would demolish him in some much more public way. But they would not become dependents.”

“The women you know grew up in a much different environment,” Kit said quietly.

“There are some truths that seem so intrinsic—so instinctual, even—that I cannot believe they can be overcome by environment,” Nolan said.

“Then you have a lot to learn,” she said. “What you teach a man in the cradle he will carry with him to the grave. He may fight it—he may learn new truths that contradict and supersede the old ones—but he will not ever be able to entirely convince himself that what he learned first is wrong.”

“That’s terrible,” he said, “if true.”