CHAPTER NINEThat evening Gardenia kept to her bedroom. She felt she could not face the Baron.
The memory of his kiss seemed to sear her lips so that, even though she had rubbed them until they were raw, the horror and the indignity of it remained.
“I hate him!” she stormed, walking up and down her room and then knew with a sudden feeling of utter helplessness that there was nothing she could do about it.
How could she go to Aunt Lily and complain? And there was no one else. Never before in her life had she felt so utterly alone.
With tears in her eyes she thought how this was the lot of all women that they were at the mercy of men.
Suffragettes, with their screams for equality, might well have made themselves laughing stocks, but in many ways they were right for, however much people m
