Noble watched Ford play with his glass, and frowned to himself. "No," he said, almost right away, when Ford asked the question. He didn't even have to really think about it. He thought of their own parents, who were glaringly flawed but had certainly loved them — even with Noble's anger towards their father, he knew Papa had loved them — and he thought of Henrietta's parents, her mother, who did not seem to love her children as anything more than a means to an end. She was a bad person.

"I mean — how are they a bad father? But no —" he shook his head even as he posed the question; it was less that he actually thought there was nuance, and more that Noble thought he was perhaps being too rigid, too quickly. "— people who have children owe it to their children to be good parents."

Children were little blank slates who hadn't done anything wrong; they deserved love and care from fathers who had chosen to inflict the world on them.

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