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cording to my mind, that he is needed more there than here." |
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Alinor could not have been in more perfect agreement. If the previous spring in Limassol she had agreed she longed for home more to soothe Simon than from any real desire, that was no longer true. She was sorry for Berengaria, yet out of patience with her. She and Joanna, who had recovered her temper and her sense of humor, had tried to explain to Berengaria how best to win her husband's friendship if his love was beyond her. First Joanna, then Alinor, then Joanna again had pointed out that, when Richard depended upon her for an emotional outlet, an appreciative audience, and all the other comforts a wife could provide, love might return on the heels of companionship. |
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It was useless. Alinor's descriptions of the expedients she used to shock or cajole Simon out of bad temper or sadness, which set Joanna into fits of laughter, merely repelled Berengaria. A gentleman, Berengaria cried, should only show his lady a smiling face, whatever the constraints upon him. Joanna replied tartly that men were human, not patterns of perfection like Yvain or Lancelot. Whoever heard of a hero in a romance having a bellyache, a toothache, or a passel of fleas under his armor? But they could do nothing. In the insulated life Berengaria had lived in her father's Court, she had had no experience with men with bellyaches and bad teeth. And if they had flea bites, they waited until they were out of her presence before they scratched. She had not even any experience with spirits exacerbated by political problems; those were thrashed out among more practical minds. |
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Far worse than the effect of her lachrymose and despairing mistress was the return of Alinor's old enemy, ennui. There was nothing to do. The marvels of architecture, the wonders of luxury that appeared in the shops of Acre, were too familiar already to wake much |
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