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Page 256
Queen had really meant that, unless she were hit in the face with proof, she would turn a blind eye if Simon and Alinor wished to become lovers. Had she said the same to Simon? Was that what lit the flame in his eyes? Simon?
The fact that Alinor had already considered tricking or forcing Simon into raping her had no effect on her feeling of revulsion. She had considered the idea only as an expedient, a step on the road to marriage. She had dismissed the notion because of its effect on Simon. The fact that she had no moral scruples about bedding Simon outside of marriage and that the Queen had actually suggested and condoned an affair also had no mitigating effect. Alinor regarded the idea that Simon would eagerly accept such a relationship with horror. Men and women were different. Women were sensible and practical creatures, and an affair was a sensible and practical solution to the problem of two people who loved each other and could not marry. Men, however, had their honor. Without it, a male was a distorted shadow, a simulacrum, a two-legged beast, not a man. If Simon was such a thingSimon?then perhaps, Alinor thought, my grandfather was the last man alive.
Alinor was not so innocent after six months at Court as she had been after sixteen years of her grandfather's and Sir Andre's company. She had been much shocked when she discovered that a number of the Queen's younger ladies had lovers. At first when she thought it over and considered the men to whom these ladies were married, it seemed logical. What better expression of contempt could there be for such a marriage. Later Alinor realized that the lovers were often worse than the husbands. They sighed of everlasting devotion while ogling over their lady's shoulders for another victim. Or they panted of their pain and their lady's unkindness into another all-too-sympathetic shell-like ear. She had even heard a lover, in

 
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