"Mildly so - my suspicion is that there isn't anything in particular, just a general feeling that women are delicate and ill health contagious. And possibly some conflating of disease and virtue as well."

"Well, I'll be treating injuries, not diseases, but I guess I shouldn't expect any level of logical connectivity here."

"Unfortunately, yes."

"How do you stand it?"

"... Hm. I sometimes find it an interesting challenge to work around the restrictions. What I find truly frustrating is the lack of real ability to affect the world, even when I can find ways around the restrictions resulting from my sex."

"What kind of real ability to affect the world would you want to have?"

"Well, ideally, substantial wealth I could independently direct, as well as enough respect from other nobility that I could influence policies generally."

"If you were a boy would you have those things?"

"Yes, I would. My grandfather is quite wealthy, and my mother is his only child."

"If you didn't get married, who'd inherit, if you can't?"

"I suppose if I died my grandfather would name an heir, with the King's permission."

"And they'd have to be a man?"

"Yes."

"What happens to... widows."

"Under what circumstances?"

"Are there any circumstances in which they can wind up controlling their marital property in their own right."

"I think the closest one can get if one is a noble woman is by being widowed, and having a young son who is the putative heir but not so old that anyone would gainsay the effective regency of his mother."

"And if she doesn't have the son, if she has no kids or only girls, then... her in-laws at whatever remove get everything? Are they obliged to support her?"

"Yes, and they are indeed so obliged."

"I guess that's something."

"Noble society, for all its faults, at least takes seriously its responsibility to provide for the comfort of the woman it so disables."

"Yaaaay."

"Is it different where you are from?"

"Yeah, single women can just have things. Married ones there's marital property but that affects their husbands too, I don't remember exactly how - when my parents divorced they must've had to figure out how to split things up but I was a baby at the time."

"Could women inherit?"