“Yes.”

She went digging into her reticule again and came up with an eraser. “I am to tell you how I came to be a maid of all work.”

“You had a falling-out with your family.” She’d told him that years ago. Everybody condemned to Soames’s establishment had also had a falling-out of some sort with family.

“Not exactly. Keep looking at whatever you’re looking at. I was unhappy.” She glanced up as if to make sure Robert hadn’t moved. “I was wretched, in fact. I’d been raised until a certain age as Jack Wentworth’s get, good for nothing but the gutter, headed for a brothel or worse. Then Jack died, Quinn’s prospects improved, and without warning or explanation, our situation changed.”

“But did your situation improve?”

“Not to my way of thinking. Instead of freedom to roam where I pleased, I was confined the livelong day. My feet were stuffed into pinch-y little slippers that I was forever losing. My hair was trussed up in braids and ribbons and infernally uncomfortable pins. My time was spent incarcerated in a schoolroom, where I was supposed to cram ten years of learning into two. Quinn was never home.”

And of all the tribulations she listed, that last was probably the most bewildering.

“He was off pursuing his dreams,” Robert said, “while you were imprisoned with governesses and elocution teachers.”

“Quinn was worried about Stephen, and with good reason. Then we started spending much of the year in London—the financial capital of the world, to hear Quinn tell it. The more Quinn’s purse thrived, the more miserable I became.”

She bent to her sketching, and Robert let his imagination roam over the plight of a street urchin being made over into a young lady. All of her freedoms taken away, her friendships ripped asunder, and should she have the temerity to question her good fortune, she’d be told, as Robert had been so often told, “It’s for your own good.”

Were there five more presumptuous, pontifical, preposterous words in the language?

“You had no friends,” he said. “Your servants kept you at arm’s length, and your brother lost sight of you when he was home.” Robert knew what was coming, in the same way that an odd, detached sort of anxiety or peculiarity of vision sometimes told him a seizure was on the way.

“I had no friends, but as we bided in York the summer I was fifteen, I engaged the affections of a handsome fellow whose parents owned the house across the alley from ours. The parents were traveling in the Low Countries, and Quinn was away for weeks at a time. The young man and I would meet in the mews. We talked about everything, and we traded notes that became increasingly ridiculous. He left me flowers, I gave him an embroidered handkerchief, and the inevitable soon occurred.”