“It has, of course, been wonderful to be with Papa, although he always treated me as if I was his son rather than his daughter. But I want my daughter, if I have one, to play with dolls and to think of them, as I wanted to do, as if they were her children.”
She was speaking in a dreamlike voice as if to herself.
“If you feel like that,” the Duc said, “why do you not get married and have children of your own?”
“That is what I would like to do when I find a husband who would care for them as much as I do,” Marcia replied.
The Duc thought this over.
Then he said,
“What you are saying is that the men who have proposed to you, and I gather there have been a great number, would not in your opinion have made good fathers.”
“They might have done,” Marcia admitted, “but they gave no indicati
