"Potter!" exclaimed Mrs. Ess Kay, "don't tease her; and when you've been in the green fields of England you'll say insects, not--er--what you did say, if you don't want ladies to faint all around you on the floor." Then she turned to me. "He means you're very innocent, because you don't know what it is to be interviewed. But you must have been it, all the same, for see here, in this dreadful Flashlight." And she handed me a newspaper, with one page folded over, and huge headings dotted about at the tops of paragraphs, like the lines of big print that oculists keep to make you try your eyesight. In the middle column I saw my name, but I couldn't believe it was really there, in an American paper. I began to think I wasn't awake yet, and that this must be part of the dream I was dreaming all yesterday.
"BONNY--BETTY--BULKELEY," I read out aloud. "A Duke's Daughter on the Dock. Call Her by Her Front Name, Please. What Lady Betty Thinks of Our Boys."
There was more, but when I had got so far, I simply gasped.
"How dare they?"
"There isn't much they don't dare, except to go back without a 'story'," said Mr. Parker, laughing. But I didn't laugh. I was too angry.
"If my brother were here, he'd kill them," I said.
"Then he hasn't got a sense of humour," replied Mr. Parker; "I don't see how a Duke could have, and be a Duke nowadays; but I guess I wouldn't mind swopping my sense of humour for a dukedom, all the same. See here, Lady Betty, you'll get to like our newspapers before you've been over here a month. They sort of grow on you. They're as interesting as novels, and almost as true to life."
"This isn't true to my life, anyway," I said, not knowing whether I wanted most to laugh or cry. "Oh, Sally, Sally Woodburn, will anybody believe I said such things as these?"
"Give the Flashlight to me and let me look," she said. And when she'd taken the paper, she began to read the stuff that came under the big headings, out aloud, in her pretty, soft voice.
"Yesterday was a blazer, but though it was hot enough on the docks to roast a coon, when the Big Willie steamed in, that beautiful young visitor to our shores, Lady Betty Bulkeley, managed to look like the Duke's daughter and Duke's sister she is, and so far as a mere man could tell, without the help of patent hair curlers, or other artificial aids to personal pulchritude.