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.

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