Any hopes that he might truly be interested in her answer died when she said it was about a debutante. He supposed it was probably natural for young women to want to read fiction they could insert themselves into, but he didn't read that sort of thing and didn't intend to. He could have feigned interest and asked her some other questions about the book, but given their earlier conversational turn he thought his disinterest might be too obvious. She was apparently vigilant enough to sniff him out when he stopped paying attention to what she was saying. He wasn't sure whether that was a mark in her favor or not.

"Do you enjoy travel yourself?" he asked instead.

---

Victor was glad he'd changed the subject; this was something they could apparently both talk about, which was a relief after so many false starts. "My family traveled when I was younger, too. All sorts of places that one wouldn't expect, due to my father's various academic interests. I didn't go anywhere conventional until after I graduated Hogwarts," he explained. He'd never had a proper tour of the continent as some young men did, since he'd decided to pick up a career right out of Hogwarts and had been devoted to it ever since. Still, he'd had plenty of time and money to explore things in shorter stints. When he'd been a member of Excalibur he'd had a few friends from the club that had staged weekend trips to various places, and he'd always been first in line for those short sprees.

"I've plans to spend my birthday this year in Greece," he continued. When he remembered how he'd framed the trip to his mother, he grew momentarily pensive. This was the last big trip he intended to take before he married, if all went according to plan; the next time he left the country he presumed it would be for his honeymoon. "It's a funny twist of our society that women have so much more freedom to travel after they marry, while men have so much less," he pointed out.

---

"Oh, no," Victor replied with a careless shrug. He assumed whoever he married would like travel just fine. He'd never met anyone who admitted to hating travel, though presumably some must exist. In any case, if they did exist, he had no intentions of finding and marrying them.

"I only meant it becomes more difficult logistically," he continued. "A single man can afford to be spontaneous on occasion, while a man with a family cannot. Travel becomes more of an ordeal the more children one has to bring along."

---

Victor was amused by her reaction, and his expression showed it. "No, you certainly don't have to mind them all the time, but you do have to house them," he pointed out playfully. Perhaps this would be less of a problem if he confined his travels to only the typical tourist destinations, where hotels were bound to be plentiful and usually large. For the sorts of places the Daphnels had gone when Victor was a child, accommodating a family of six wasn't always easy. It was quite understandable that once they'd reached Hogwarts age as a collective, father had stopped taking them along for his various travels.

"And anyway, I don't imagine there will be much of a window between my marriage and my having children," he continued carelessly, to her earlier point. Why wait? Having children was at least half the point of getting married in the first place.

---

Victor shook his head with the attitude of a mentor gently correcting a pupil who had made a silly mistake. "The thing about that — every year I get older and the marriageable women don't," he pointed out. Of course, larger age gaps were acceptable for men. It wasn't uncommon to see a man in his forties or fifties or even older marrying a woman who had barely broken twenty. After having thought it through from his sister's perspective recently, though, Victor knew he didn't want that sort of dynamic for his future marriage. He didn't expect to love his wife, necessarily, but he did expect to be able to leave certain responsibilities to her when it came to running the household and managing the family's social calendar. He couldn't marry someone he viewed as a child.

"And anyway. I promised my mother I'd handle the matter before she needed to worry over it," he added with a chuckle.

---

Victor reflected on this briefly. "Mothers worry more about their daughters than their sons, I think," he commented. At least, that seemed to be true in his household. Perhaps it was because the pressure for a woman to succeed in life was condensed into such a short time frame, comparatively. Men had their entire twenties to decide what they would make of themselves, and begin down that path. Women who didn't make a match in a handful of seasons were stained by failure even if they did eventually marry, so it was necessary to make each of those moments count.

On the other hand, maybe it only seemed that way to him because Beatrice was worth considerably more worry than all the boys in the family combined. Victor prided himself on having been a model son to his parents, but even his less-ideal younger brothers had never caused their mother half as much grief as Bea managed to do on a monthly basis during the social season.

"But it does always seem the mother's lot to worry," he acknowledged with a shrug. If his own father was any indication, at any rate... Vincent Daphnel did little more these days than return letters within a few weeks, which could hardly be construed as worrying. "I can understand why a young woman might see some appeal in staving off the arrival of children."

(He was still quite decided that there would be no waiting for children, once he married).

---

Victor sighed and shook his head with half a smile, his attitude somewhere between amused and condescending. "There are appeals to becoming a pirate, but that doesn't mean any responsible gentleman would do so," he replied. If he was living life based only on his own whims, he wouldn't be marrying yet at all; he still felt he had plenty of good bachelor years at his disposal. There was a generally acceptable window for men to marry, however, and a good deal of it had to do with what he'd mentioned earlier about what a narrow age range young women were considered marriageable in. A man could reasonably take his second or third wife when he was past fifty, but no one would argue it was acceptable to wait that long to claim the first one. A man's life was less scripted than a woman's, perhaps, but there was still a procession to be followed: establish oneself professionally and socially; take a wife; have children. These all followed in a neat line, one after another, and Victor didn't intend to deviate from the plan for his own amusement. Not when doing so was liable to cause his mother undue worry.

---