A Veronica Speedwell Mystery - A Curious Beginning

“It just occurred to you that I was at liberty and might make my escape. Yes, I know. You are a wretched abductor, Mr. Stoker. I suggest you do not take up felonious activity as a career.”

His expression was sullen. “You will have to make allowances. It is, after all, my first abduction.”

. I have known enough of women to understand they are as duplicitous and vicious as men. If they are capable of being our equals in malice, why not in our better qualities as well? There are no masculine virtues, Veronica. And none sacred to women either. We are all of us just people, and most badly flawed ones at that.”

“And it never occurred to you that you might begin by treating me as an equal? Veronica, you cannot expect confidences if you will not give them.”

“There are times when it is entirely safe to show one’s vulnerability, to roll over and reveal the soft underbelly beneath. But there are other times when pain must be borne without a murmur, when the pain is so consuming that if you give in to it, even in the slightest, you have lost everything.”

“That truth is like that fox pup. If you suffer its ill effects in silence, it can do irreparable harm. Perhaps even kill you.”

“I never went to school, nor did I have a governess. Books were my tutors, Mr. Stoker. Anything I wished to learn I taught myself.”
“There are limits to an autodidactic education,” he pointed out.
“Few that I have found. I was spared the prejudices of formal educators.”