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Page 11
Again there was a silence. Alinor studied Joanna's face with a new, shocked understanding. In general, love and marriage had very little to do with each other. Men and women were mated to make political alliances, to increase or join estates, to provide security for a woman, and, if a woman was an heiress, to provide a livelihood for her husband. Alinor's grandparents, married against both their wills for political purposes, had fallen deeply and sincerely in love. Alinor had been raised in that atmosphere, for her parents had been drowned when she was two. She had seen the joy with which love can invest everyday life. She had seen the pain also; the quarrels and the tears, the terror her grandmother endured when her grandfather rode out to war. Adventurous by nature, Alinor had thought the pain a small price to pay in exchange for the joy.
It had never occurred to her that Joanna could feel differently. But Joanna was different. She did not lack couragenot in the least. Like her father, she had the strong, deep courage of ultimate endurance. She also had Simon's caution. Whereas Alinor rushed headlong to meet danger, impatient for the conflict and the decisionJoanna waited for trouble to come to her. She never retreated from it, but she did not seek it out either.
She does not wish to permit herself to love, Alinor thought. It was perfectly logical. Joanna had also been raised in a household where love reigned, but perhaps she had seenor rememberedmore of the pain than the joy. She was eight when her father sickened; for more than a year she had watched him die inch by inch and had watched her mother's heart die with him. Then she had lived through the first tempestuous years of Alinor's second marriage. Alinor loved Ian as deeply and perhaps even more passionately than she had loved Simon, but what Joanna had seen was their difficult adjustment to each other and then her mother's constant fear for her stepfather's safety.
Yet it was impossible for Joanna to avoid love, Alinor thought. There was a passion in her as hot as her fiery hair. Alinor's eyes flicked across the room to the dog. Look how

 
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