Alice turned her face to her cousin, though Lory didn't look at her. "The what?" But she didn't press for Lory's suggestion shocked her and drew her attention away almost instantly.

"Don't ye know that's wicked. We do not give up our own." That was what her father had said. Yet some grudgeful part of her felt she had been given up by her own. "If ye choose to do what makes a bairn, ye must also look after it!" Coincidentally also her father's words.

Lory immediately reached for a cucumber and cloth, then deftly wrapped the top half in lieu of words. Instead, she made a circle with her thumb and index finger, and illustrated to Alice the covered part going in and out.

Someone coughed walking by their stand.

“What do you call hoisting you off onto some old man, Alice?” she was quick to jump on. “Is that looking after our own?”

Alice stared at the gesture. Her face felt hot. She wasn't used to such a... bold demonstration. Lory's words disturbed her more, however. They jumped at her throat and sat on her chest, making it hard to breathe. They were meant to be thought and then buried, not spoken. Her eyes burned again but she tried to keep her tears in this time. "I would 'ave been a burden. It was me own choice." She said quietly. She turned to the cart and put the turnip she had been holding back on the pile, rearranging it for no reason other than to seem busy.

Lory half wanted to disappear into the ground when she saw the look on her much less worldly cousin’s face. But Alice was the one in the predicament, was she not? And she used that thought to bolster herself. She should have shown her that one as soon as she’d learned it!

She needed to show the other girls, before they too ended up in this predicament. Oh, God. Anne would probably never look her in the eye again.

She set the cucumber back on the stand (and a fellow walking by stopped, picked it up, and looked it over like it was the first cuke he’d ever seen), but kept the cloth and wrung it about her hands.

“And this is mine,” Lory sighed.

She missed the fellow groping his butt experimentally right in front of them.

The stranger was a perfect target to redirect her emotions on. "Go away, you pervert!" she shouted at him, and she flung a turnip at his chest.

Lory made a noise in the back of her throat. She crossed her arms, covered half her face in her hand.

At least Alice was angrier at a stranger than her.

When she had chased the young man away, Alice redirected her attention to her cousin. "Ye could be a maid... or move to the city and get another job... If ye say ye were a pupil-teacher, maybe they'll even hire ye to do t' typin'."

Lory pulled her arms tighter about herself.

“Until I get married,” she filled in, voice harsher than she wanted.

She frowned, and took a breath before trying again.

“I don’t know I could stand it long. I can,” she glanced up at the passers-by, then leaned down to whisper, “I can take a lover this way.”

More like she could fantasize about taking an actual lover whilst said fantasy pranced about.

Alice watched Lory and couldn't help feeling compassion. She stepped closer and put an arm around her shoulder to comfort her. "Ye could take a lover for a husband, Lory. Ye don't need to sell yerself to one. That's not love."

Lory stared at Alice in complete stillness.

Shoppers passed. One picked up an onion. Still she stood unmoving, wide eyed.

Marry a lover! Did she think she was stupid? That she did not realize marriage begot some of the same things people paid for, were that what she was after? Marry a lover! How had that worked for her?! MARRY A LOVER! How many women would be married to other women just because they weren’t men, were that an option!?

Lory finally managed to pry her frothing-with-rage gaze away from Alice, running fingers over her bare, unwed hand with relish.

“I’ll look into typing,” she said instead.