"Perhaps. It still feels like a small kind of cowardice."
"I don't think you understand what a rare thing it is," Julian said, "to be the person in the room willing to notice at all. Most people are perfectly content not to look too closely at arrangements like that. It's easier not to."
"Is that what you've done? Not looked too closely?"
He exhaled something between a laugh and a sigh. "For eleven days I have looked at nothing else. It's rather all I can think about, if I'm honest, though I've been doing an admirable job of pretending otherwise to everyone but myself." He glanced at her, something wry in his expression. "You are, I should say, a remarkably difficult woman to lie to for someone I met eleven minutes ago."
"I've been told that's a fault."
"I find it isn't, particularly." He turned the newspaper over in his hands, still unread, still forgotten. "May I tell you something I haven't told anyone? Not my mother, not my solicitor, not a single one of the men I call friends."
"You may."
"I have spent the better part of a year rehearsing arguments in my head for why this marriage is the correct decision: the debt it settles, the alliance it secures, the duty of it. And not once, not a single time, have I managed to convince myself entirely. There is always some small, stubborn part of me that says it is not enough merely to be correct, and I have never known quite what to do with that part of myself, because everyone around me insists it is an indulgence I cannot afford." He shook his head slightly, as if surprised at his own candor. "I don't know why I am telling a woman I have known for a quarter of an hour something I have not said to anyone else in a year."
"Perhaps because I have nothing to gain from telling you you're wrong to feel it," Marianne said gently. "Everyone else in your life has something at stake in the answer. I don't. I'm only a woman who climbed into the wrong carriage."
"That may be the most honest reason I've been given for anything in longer than I can remember."
The carriage hit a rut in the road and jolted them both forward, and Marianne caught herself against the seat with a small laugh of her own. And when she looked up, he was watching her—not with the polished, practiced attention of a man accustomed to being watched himself, but with something plainer and more curious, like he was trying to work out why a woman who had ruined his evening was also somehow the easiest conversation he'd had in weeks.