“Some of us have to settle for far less than that,” Jean retorted with some warmth. She wasn’t sure anymore whether she was agreeing or disagreeing with him; it was as if he had taken a sledgehammer to a stained glass window. “Companionship and affection and family life—these things can’t be easily discounted.” She was aware that her voice was shaking. It was both a relief and a kind of torture to speak frankly for once.

“You are quite right. I’m not blaming Gretchen, by the way. I blame myself. I often wonder if she’d have done better to wait until she met someone she could fully love. But I was there, on the spot, so to speak, when there was a certain amount of urgency to provide Margaret with a father and a respectable upbringing. Her mother certainly thought so.”

“You’re not suggesting she was pressured into marriage against her will?” Jean protested. “Nobody who has seen you together could possibly think so.”

“No, no, nothing as brutal as that. She accepted me gratefully, but now I think I did her a disservice in proposing when she was so vulnerable and her mother was dying. It was hardly a free choice.”

“You talk as if the good fortune was all yours. Because she is young and pretty. But she is lucky to have you, too. Kind, decent men are scarce.”

Of course he was better than just kind and decent, she thought—words that hardly stirred the soul. He was the best man she knew and Gretchen the luckiest woman. But this could not be said.

“Are they?”

“In my experience.”

She could call to mind only three—Roy Drake, Dorrie’s husband, Kenneth, and Howard himself. Even her own father had fallen short in the end. To her dismay she found her eyes beginning to smart, and she turned away and stared out of the window at the green hedgerows until she had mastered herself. It wasn’t sadness that prompted the threat of tears but a general sense of emotional fullness that always accompanied any attempt to discuss her inner life.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Jean,” Howard said. “I’m sure you deserve much better.”

“I don’t know about that. I probably got exactly what I deserved. I seem to be attracted to precisely the sort of man who isn’t husband material. Not my husband, anyway.” She gave a hollow laugh.

“I hope I haven’t upset you,” he said. “I felt I could talk freely to you. I don’t know why.”

“You can. I’m glad you did.”

“I suppose you give the impression that you don’t judge people.”

Jean had never thought of herself in this light before; sometimes, in fact, she caught herself out in some act of lofty disapproval and felt ashamed. Howard’s confident assertion of her goodness made her the more determined to live up to it and be the broad-minded, tolerant person he thought her. I love him, she thought with a kind of wonderment. I never intended to, but now I do. The relief of admitting it to herself and accepting it as a fact that couldn’t be dismissed or changed was like throwing off chains.