Gabriel’s jaw tightened briefly at the reminder. If not for Ollie coming to fetch him, Gabriel would never have known Euphemia had gone to Mother Comfort’s. She’d have been trapped there on her own, with only her parasol and her dog to protect her. Her seemingly bottomless well of self-confidence notwithstanding, Gabriel doubted she’d have walked out of the place unscathed.

“And that was nothing compared to what the man’s wife must endure,” Euphemia said. “He only insulted me. He didn’t have a legal right to my earnings or my property.”

Gabriel seemed to have lost the thread of the conversation. Had that ruffian been married? And if Gabriel didn’t know the answer, how in the hell did Euphemia? “I don’t follow,” he said. “What does the man’s wife have to do with it?”

“Not just his wife, but the wives of all men like him. A man who drinks his wages, and who shortly finds himself unemployed, will inevitably turn his eye to his wife’s earnings. He’ll soon run through those as well, impoverishing them both. The law allows him to do so.”

Gabriel looked at her in dawning realization. This time his heart did more than beat heavily. It seemed to stop beating entirely. “Good God,” he uttered. “I might have known you were a bluestocking.”

The signs had all been there. Her confidence. Her singularity. The way she spoke and moved, with such uncommon sense of purpose. He felt a fool not to have recognized it before.

Strong, intelligent women had always been his weakness. He blamed it on the example set by Miles’s mother, Rose. She’d been something of a bluestocking, too, with her forward-thinking ways, and her determination to better herself and her son despite all the odds against her.

The granite wall of Gabriel’s already weakened defenses began to crumble.

Euphemia smiled slightly. “Label me what you will, the facts remain the same. If it’s reform you’re after, you must consider the women’s situation as something distinct from the men’s.”

“You presume this won’t help them, just because it helps the men as well?”

“I make no presumption. I only ask—”

“Many a widow with children to raise would benefit from decent housing. The mother of one of my friends had to bring him up in a room no larger than a cupboard. They froze in winter, and near suffocated from the stench in the summer. The rotting walls were thin as paper, and the street outside a cesspit. And she was one of the fortunate ones.”

Euphemia’s spoon stilled halfway to her mouth. She lowered it back to her soup dish untouched.