She was shooting him down, but the worst part was that Ben couldn't even refute her. Maybe she was being too pessimistic, but what did he know? It was her world, not his. He hadn't been born into her kind of family, with her kind of parents. He hadn't ever had to consider getting married to some boring, stodgy old man just to maintain his current lifestyle. He sometimes had to be nice to Aldous to prevent getting cut off entirely, but in recent years he had been far more independent. He'd really mostly had to walk that line while he was getting Aldous to fund his booze trips around Europe and that was... well, decidedly different.

Still, he couldn't just let it go. "I'm going to find a way to fix this. I am."