Cosima had spent so many years absorbing that particular cruelty — the steady, low commentary on her body, her plainness, her wrongness, delivered often by people paid to serve her — that she had come to experience it as a kind of weather, unpleasant but inevitable, nothing anyone would ever think to shield her from.

It had never once occurred to her that a person might simply refuse to let it be said in their house.

That someone might hear a woman being made small and, rather than pretend not to notice, or murmur that she shouldn’t take it to heart, or suggest that the dressmaker had a point, would simply end it.

The firing told Cosima something the marriage contract never had: that in this house, her dignity was not a matter of opinion, and not a thing she had to earn or defend.

It was simply assumed.

She had gone her whole life being taught that her worth was in question and that the burden of proving it was hers.