“I cannot feel like a duchess in mymother’s sitting room.”“What do you feel like, then?”“Hmmm.” She took a sip of her tea. “Just DaphneBridgerton, I suppose. It’s difficult to shed the surname inthis clan. In spirit, that is.”“I hope that is a compliment,” Lady Bridgerton remarked.Daphne just smiled at her mother. “I shall never escapeyou, I’m afraid.” She turned to Gareth. “There is nothing like one’s family to make one feel like one has nevergrown up.”

“I feel like a cup of tea with no milk. I just had one. It was disgusting.”

“Let me explain it to you then. I just had a beautiful girl trust me enough to touch her and see her in a way no one else ever has. I got to hold her and watch her and feel her as she came apart in my arms. It was like nothing else I'd ever experienced. She was breathtaking and she was responding to me. She wanted me. I was the one making her spiral out of control.”

“It feels like something I was born to do, like I am supposed to be her with her.”

“Hazel should have done something—left a note, pretended she was going to go visit Jack’s aunt Bernice. Something. She was so busy thinking about the one she needed to rescue she didn’t think at all about the one she was leaving behind. She was supposed to take care of her mother, too. She was not supposed to be sipping honey tea with people who are just like the parents you think you are supposed to have. Her mother was what she had.”

“I think," Ella said, "that what a woman does or doesn't do should be up to the woman, and she should make up her own mind and not change it when the wind starts to blow. I think a woman should be who she is, not what others expect her to be. And if she wants to go to a dance looking for a man, she should go and not feel like she has to explain herself. And if she want to have her own farm, she should do that and not feel like she has to explain that, either. And…I think you should be quiet now.”