“Read about me?” Julia’s mouth opened almost as wide as young Tay’s. “Where?”
“Oh, our correspondents don’t let us miss anything, and that was a big plum for the end of the season. I know all about your romantic marriage, and your still more romantic West Indian home.” She had bred herself too carefully to add, “and that you will one day be a duchess”; but the words danced through her mind, and she felt that she was having an adventure. Julia was in no condition to notice any faux pas; her imagination was visualizing her insignificant self in the columns of a newspaper seven thousand miles away, and she felt a strange thrill, such as what small deferences she had received from servants and toadies had never excited in her: the first vague pricking of ambition.
“There was a picture of you in the Sunday supplement of one of the papers,” went on Mrs. Bode. “Of course I guessed it wasn’t you—looked suspiciously like one of our own belles touched up —”
“My picture! I’ve never had my picture taken.”
“The more pity,” said Mrs. Bode, with gracious gayety. “I should beg for one as a souvenir, if you had.”
“Gee whiz! My camera!” cried young Tay, recovering himself, and whipping the camera off his shoulder. “Will—would you stand?”
“Of course!” Julia not only had fallen in love with her new friends, but rejoiced in doing something which she instinctively knew would annoy her husband. When woman’s ego is fumbling, it is only in these world-old acts of petty and secret vengeance that it triumphs for a moment over the sex that has bruised it.
She posed, with and without her hat, against the gray walls of the ruin, in a group with Mrs. Bode and Emily, and again with young Tay alone. Then she lit her candle and led them down the winding passage to the room where Mary of Scotland was supposed to have slept on her way to Fotheringay. As they emerged once more into the court, she impulsively asked them to come that afternoon to the castle for tea.
“I am sure my aunt will be enchanted to see you,” she added, “and I can show you over Bosquith, which is much more interesting than this.”
“I’ll be delighted,” said Mrs. Bode; and Julia, who had experienced a moment of fright at her temerity, took courage again at the American’s matter-of-fact acceptance. Pride also came to her aid. Why should she not ask whom she chose to Bosquith? Was she not its chatelaine? Her aunt was one of her guests, monitress though she might be. To be sure, she had been forbidden to ask Bridgit or Ishbel, but, then, the duke had a personal dislike for both—he now thought Ishbel quite mad and had written her father a letter of condolence; he was hospitable in his way, and could find no objection to these delightful travellers that knew Mrs. Winstone.