Evelyn stared at him and was almost pleased at his embarrassment. "You think women are just dead below? Why would women ever take lovers then? " She shrugged as she walked with him. "I am sure he did. Sorry for your loss, by the way. He was a murderer but he was your brother first. Are you doing alright?" She asked as if suddenly remembering they had lost someone.

Her head lifted to look around. "The kitchen, we aren't near it yet. If you are bored of me already, you know I can't keep you."

The blush only darkened.

“For money,” he answered, quickly, readily. “The pleasure women feel is in money.”

Right? went unstated, but his statement almost ended in a question mark nonetheless.

Oh, thank God she was talking about his dead brother. Now he just wanted to cry instead of join him.

“He was-- more of a murderer than a brother,” he frowned in voiced realization, the thought only finishing made corporeal. “But he was a good man.”

Weirdly, he wished he’d settled for crying. That wouldn’t come with the thoughts.

“No, you can’t,” he agreed, but kept along.

He looked distant, maybe a little red-eyed now that the blush had faded.

Evelyn shook her head. "That wouldn't explain why rich men would worry about their wives around handsome stable boys." She suggested without a care.

She was quiet as he spoke before looking over. "He was a good man.. to you. So it's hard to see him otherwise. And he was a brother to you all your life. Is it hard to see him the way you did before this happened?" She asked. "I have an older brother. I don't know what I'd do if it turned out he was horrible. He's so good to me. My little brother too. I'd never imagine in a million years they could hurt someone. Though Sam did say he'd break a boy's legs for hurting me." She seemed almost pleased as she said it.

"I think that's just things people say to show they care."

She nodded and walked with him to the house to get into the kitchen. "Thank you for walking with me." He didn't have to, she'd never cause her mother trouble. It could cause her to lose her job.

Roderick squinted at her.

“I’ve never heard of that,” he said, with a defiant tip of his chin.

Except from Magnus, maybe – but those women were whores!

“We-- weren’t that close,” he admitted. “In age,” he quickly clarified. “Charles Darwin says that all these things happen for a reason,” he ventured, uncertainly, though the certainty seemed to materialize more thickly with each word. “That every species has natural selection. Magnus was picking off the undesirables, was he not?”

A thought seemed to cross his face.

“Dr. Witaker’s wife must have been hideous,” he decided aloud.

Hm. Which would imply Evelyn’s brother breaking legs was, too, a form of natural selection. Good thing Evelyn was made of stone.

When she thanked him, Roderick blinked.

“Oh,” he said dumbly. “You’re-” wait, manners were for equals, “uh, bound to get lost otherwise.”

He hovered awkwardly.

The woman shrugged and listened to him speak. She glanced over to listen about his brother and Darwin. "Oh? And then he couldn't defend himself at last. I think that's the real truth about violence." She didn't like it at all, but had no answers for it. And certainly sometimes violence had to be rewarded with violence, she guessed.

"What?" She said confused about Whitaker's wife. Why bring her up?

Evelyn rose a brow and a strange look of realization came to her eyes. She actually managed to stifle the smile that tempted her lips. "You could have simply ordered a servant to do it. But you did it yourself. Thank you for humbling yourself for a nobody like me."

Roderick sneered, though mostly at the ground. He picked a daisy, and plucked a petal off with a hint of teeth beneath the right side of his lip.

“He was born better,” he insisted, rubbing the petal to a rolled up wad between his fingers. “Taken before his time, by a selfish, conniving who-…” his eyes flicked up to Evelyn, recalling that girls fainted at naughty words, “-rrible person.”

Swept again into his own ocean of self-pity, Roderick frowned at her question.

“What?” he answered back, as though the letter drama and his place as righteous better were as obvious as the sky was blue.

Roderick stared for a moment. Looked to the door he had just walked her to, then to the ground they stood on, and then to her again with an uncomfortable dawning of realization. She was right.

That could not stand.

“Don’t be so arrogant. I was just going to the washroom.”

He stormed ahead, and then swerved down the hall.

It would have been a lot shorter to the washroom to go that direction from the garden.

His words had left her all the more concerned. She wanted to soothe the anger and bitterness that still rolled within him. But he'd decided to be done with the conversation and leave. As Roderick left, she called after him, ignoring or not noticing anyone around who could overhear.

"You know, as rich and powerful a man may be, he is still always lifted even higher when he's also a gentleman. I hope, if nothing else.. our conversation helped you realize that you are loved." Evelyn added, remembering how she'd come upon him in the garden.
She shrugged and headed in towards the kitchen. Perhaps he truly was in a hurry. If she saw him again, she'd be sure to thank him.