"Don't put the blame on her head," said Lady Glencora. "Women have always pluck for anything. Wouldn't you like to see a live Kurd, Alice?"
"I don't exactly know where they live," said Alice.
"Nor I. I have not the remotest idea of the way to the Kurds. You see my joke, don't you, though Plantagenet doesn't? But one knows that they are Eastern, and the East is such a grand idea!"
"I think we'll content ourselves with Rome, or perhaps Naples, on this occasion," said Mr. Palliser.
The notion of Lady Glencora packing anything for herself was as good a joke as that other one of the Kurds and whey. But she went flitting about from room to room, declaring that this thing must be taken, and that other, till the market-basket would have become very large indeed. Alice was astonished at the extent of the preparations, and the sort of equipage with which they were about to travel. Lady Glencora was taking her own carriage. "Not that I shall ever use it," she said to Alice, "but he insists upon it, to show that I am not supposed to be taken away in disgrace. He is so good;—isn't he?"
"Very good," said Alice. "I know no one better."
"And so dull!" said Lady Glencora. "But I fancy that all husbands are dull from the nature of their position. If I were a young woman's husband, I shouldn't know what to say to her that wasn't dull."
Two women and two men servants were to be taken. Alice had received permission to bring her own maid—"or a dozen, if you want them," Lady Glencora had said. "Mr. Palliser in his present mood would think nothing too much to do for you. If you were to ask him to go among the Kurds, he'd go at once;—or on to Crim Tartary, if you made a point of it." But as both Lady Glencora's servants spoke French, and as her own did not, Alice trusted herself in that respect to her cousin. "You shall have one all to yourself," said Lady Glencora. "I only take two for the same reason that I take the carriage,—just as you let a child go out in her best frock, for a treat, after you've scolded her."
When Alice asked why it was supposed that Mr. Palliser was so specially devoted to her, the thing was explained to her. "You see, my dear, I have told him everything. I always do tell everything. Nobody can say I am not candid. He knows about your not letting me come to your house in the old days. Oh, Alice!—you were wrong then; I shall always say that. But it's done and gone; and things that are done and gone shall be done and gone for me. And I told him all that you said,—about you know what. I have had nothing else to do but make confessions for the last ten days, and when a woman once begins, the more she confesses the better. And I told him that you refused Jeffrey."
"You didn't?"