"Then do."

"Your clever notions for avoiding the social consequences being...?"

"Don't get caught. Or don't stay somewhere long enough for anyone to care."

"I am not sure I share your confidence in the reliability of those methods."

"Well, what consequences are you afraid of?"

She closes her eyes again. "I don't like how this works, but it's been made clear to me that pretty girls are supposed to 'buy' themselves security and faithfulness and matrimony with the purchase price of their beauty and constancy and initial virginity. If I 'buy' less than that or 'spend' more than that - if I deviate from this pattern in any way other than perhaps growing into a lone spinster-scholar - then I stand a reasonable chance of being treated like a pariah. Certainly this could be alleviated with frequent travel, if I liked the idea of frequent travel. Certainly I could simply say that most of the people who'd treat me that way don't matter to me - but I've never had cause to test the borders of my father's affection, now, have I? And he matters. Certainly if you were not caught, no one could laugh at me - except anyone party to the borrowing arrangement, who'd have their reasons for silence likewise. If you could be sure you would not be caught. But I cannot imagine that things have gotten worse in this dimension in the past century. Perhaps you've only forgotten; perhaps the rules are simply different for men by enough that you never learned the counterpart framework."

"It is different for men, but no one much likes a poor boy-whore with no home and no money, either."

"So that is what concerns me."

"How?"

"I could start by not fucking anyone you've met," he suggests.

"That doesn't prevent them from meeting me later," Belle points out.

"If they have no idea who you are, and don't live close by, what difference does that make?"

"People talk to each other. People travel, sometimes. If someone you - visit - far away comes to where we wind up living, wherever that is, and they see us together?"

"You're right," he says dryly, "of course they'll recognize me and run up to us shouting about what a whore I am."

"Just because I don't understand what possesses people to do certain things doesn't mean that those things are unheard of," Belle sighs.

"Anyway, this is all very much beside the point. Because all that only applies if we're married, and I don't believe we are, or will be in the next year and a half."

"We aren't," Belle agrees. "If I fell in love with you I wouldn't be about to marry anyone else, though, and spinster-scholarhood would hold rather less appeal."

"But you'll probably be a powerful enchantress, too," he muses. "And maybe the rules are different for those. Or maybe you can cheat with magic."

"Maybe. I've been focused so intently on disenchantments I hardly know what else I might be able to do one day."

"We have time to figure it out. I won't go sleeping around the country until we're sure it won't come back to bite you."

"All right. Thank you."