Portia had opened another bundle and held out a brown shell, fancy as a fern.
"Murex palmarosae," read Julian, stabbing wildly at pronunciation.
Then he undid a bundle himself.
"Anyway, I know what this one is," he said, showing her a large ear-shaped shell, lined with the luminous greens and blues of peacock feathers. "It's an abalone. But that's not what it says it is; it says it's a Haliotis something or other. I give up. I can't wait till I study Latin. How are you going to be a scientist without it?"
"I don't look forward to it in the least," said Portia. "And I'm never going to be a scientist."
Happy and absorbed, they sat cross-legged on the floor, taking out bundle after bundle. Outside of a museum they had never seen such shells: they were shaped like fans, lockets, towers, pin wheels, hearts, trumpets. They were pleated and patterned, tinted with pink, rose, crimson, yellow, mother-of-pearl; there were several pairs that looked as if they had petals and that were colored like dahlias.
"I'm going to take these down to show Mother, later," Portia said. "This is as good as a Christmas stocking, isn't it, Jule?"
"Better. More in it. I wonder who collected them all and marked them all?"
"There's an initial on the lid: the letter D."
"Oh. Then obviously it must have been that ancestor of Mrs. Brace-Gideon's: that Captain Deuteronomy Dadware. He must have sailed to every beach on earth!"