In Which Creative Writing Instructors Everywhere Cringe As Character Development Is Told, Not Shown
She's still a kind of lonely girl trying to force her way into this society with an iron will, but when she hears the gossip about the young heir to the Way fortune, she's baffled. Her husband, when he tells her, thinks it's a marvelous joke, but Victoria's surprised to find herself almost angry at this obviously spoiled child who doesn't know what he's giving up. She thinks he's slumming it, being a tourist, and as soon as the winter hits, he'll be back to his family. The winter is nasty, though, and Gerard doesn't return, and Victoria finds herself feeling inexplicibly even more angry.
When her husband dies and she starts setting up her information network, starts sending feelers back down to the slums, she's almost forgotten him, but all comes crashing back as she hears about the good doctor who treats the sick whether they can pay or not. She's not sure how she feels about it anymore. Victoria's a little older, a little less likely to blow up on the slightest stress...she puts aside her old dislike and actually looks at his deeds, and unlike his kin, his match his words, and Victoria starts to feel a slow, grudging respect.
Over the years, she starts to keep a silent but generally fairly benevolent eye on his work--although she won't deny that part of the appeal is in knowing that she's got so much of an advantage over this extremely well-born man, that he doesn't even know she's watching.
Years later, Joe lets slip a quip of Gerard's about his 'guardian angel who fell up' and Victoria feels the colour drain from her face as she realizes Gerard has known full well she's been watching. She decides against mentioning it--if he'd wanted to talk about it, he'd have brought it up when they finally met. As she thinks it over, it's actually not that surprising - Victoria is benevolent in her observations, and so no threat to Gerard's work, so why would he make a fuss when there are patients to see?
She likes his description of her - and its clear from Joe's face that he hadn't linked it back to her.
In the future, she'll feel a little sad that it took so long for her and Gerard to meet, and that they had such a short time in each other's acquaintance - she'll suspect that if they had more time, they could have become quite close.
As it is, there are times when she thinks perhaps she could talk to him. She never does, but it's that splinter of suspicion that doing so might not be so terrible that, years later, lets her feel like maybe there are worse things than getting attached to one of Joe's little flock or orphans.