"Can I ask you something forward?" she said.
"You've already climbed into my carriage uninvited. I don't think forwardness is much of a barrier between us at this point."
"Fair." She folded her hands in her lap. "Does she love someone else? Your intended?"
He was quiet long enough that she thought perhaps she'd overstepped after all. But then he said carefully, "I don't know. I've never asked."
"Why not?"
"Because it isn't relevant to the arrangement."
"It's relevant to whether either of you will be happy."
"Happiness was never the object." He said it without bitterness, which was somehow worse than if he had—a man so resigned to the fact that his own contentment was beside the point that he could state it as plainly as the weather. "The object is the alliance, the debt, the name."
"And what do you want?"
The question hung in the small space between them, and Marianne watched him turn it over, watched the muscle in his jaw work as though the answer cost him something to reach for.
"I don't know that anyone has asked me that in a very long time," he said finally, turning the newspaper over once more in his hands, as though it might offer him the words he was looking for. "Certainly not in relation to my own marriage. People ask what I require, what my position demands, what will best serve the family's interests. No one asks what I want. I'm not entirely certain, until this moment, that I'd have known how to answer even if they had."