Their reception at the castle was all that Julia could have wished. Mrs. Winstone was delighted to see them, Mrs. Bode being impeccable in her critical eyes inasmuch as she had no accent, did not flaunt her riches, and was never so aggressively well dressed that she made an Englishwoman feel dowdy. If she had been told of the Sacramento store, with the pies in front and the wash-tubs behind, it would not have affected her judgment in the least. She would have replied that all Americans had some such origin; and nothing amused her more than their ancestral pretensions. “New is new, and republics are republics,” she said once to Mrs. Macmanus, when discussing a grande dame from New York. “What silly asses they are to talk ‘family’ in Europe! We like some and we don’t others, and that’s all there is to it.”
As neither painted, she and Mrs. Bode kissed each other warmly, and, the American having had her fill of ruins long since, they went off to a comfortable fireside to gossip, leaving Emily and Daniel to Julia. The little girl was openly rebellious, when ordered to investigate the ruined portion of the castle, but Daniel would have followed Julia straight out into the North Sea. He had never been insensible to the charm of girls, but here was a goddess, and he proceeded to worship her in the whole-hearted fashion of fifteen, and with an enthusiasm the more possessing as it knew no guile.
They wandered through old rooms and passages, under and over ground, ivy-draped and stark, Julia recounting the castle’s many histories. Emily lagged behind and wilfully closed her ears. Finally, having emerged upon the flat roof of a tower, she saw that she could find her way back to the garden without getting lost, announced her intention curtly, and ran down the spiral stair.
“Good riddance,” said her brother, as he and Julia sat down to rest. “But I don’t blame her. This is the last dinky old castle that I look at this trip. America for me, anyhow. Don’t think I’m a Western savage—that is what Cherry calls me—it’s awfully good of you to climb round like this and spiel off such a lot, and this really is the dandiest castle I’ve seen. But I’ve been dragged through about a hundred, and as for pictures—wow! They can only be counted by miles. I’ll never look at another as long as I live. Give me chromos, anyhow. We have some in the garret at home, and I like them better than the old masters—got some color and go in them, and not so much religion.”
Julia laughed outright. She thought him a young barbarian, but refreshing as the crystal water of a spring after too much old burgundy—this simile inspired by memory of the army of aristocrats she had met since her arrival in England. These gentlemen, most of them splendid to look at, were either formal and correct even when most languid, or bit their ideas out in slang, giving the impression that they thought in slang, dreamed in slang, indubitably made love in it; but it was a slang, which, loose and ugly as it might be, often meaningless, seemed to cry “hands off” to all without the pale. Some were affected, but all of these were affected in precisely the same way. Each and every one was full of an inherited wisdom which betrayed itself in manner and certain rigid mental attitudes, even where brain was lacking. To Julia, at this moment, they seemed in an advanced stage of petrifaction. Even Nigel was a grandfather in comparison with this bright green shoot from the new world. And Julia warmed to his frank admiration. The men to whom she had done duty as hostess since the 15th of September had paid her little or no attention. They were interested in some one else, they found her too young, they were too tired for flirtation after a long day with the guns, or they were wary about “poaching on the preserves of a cad like France. He had a look in his eye at times that would warn any man off.”
Whatever the cause, Julia, whose natural feminine instinct for conquest had been awakened during her brief season in London while she was still a girl, and who missed Nigel’s adoration, was willing to accept her due at the hands of fifteen, nothing better offering. Besides, the boy amused her, and she was seldom amused these days.
“Tell me more about California,” she said; and under a rapid fire of questions Dan artlessly revealed the history of his family (he was very proud of it), and, incidentally, told her much of the social peculiarities of his city. It was a strange story to Julia, who knew nothing of young civilizations, and was profoundly imbued with a respect for aristocracies. She felt that she should place this young scion of a quite terrible family somewhere between the steward of Bosquith and Mr. Leggins; but when she looked squarely into that open ingenuous fearless almost arrogant face, the face of an intelligent boy born in a land whose theory is equality, and in whose short life poverty and snubs had played no part, she found herself accepting him as an equal. His face had not the fine high-bred beauty of Nigel’s nor the mathematical regularity of her husband’s, but the eyes were keener, the brow was larger and fuller, the mouth more mobile than any she knew; and these divergencies fascinated her. But she drew herself apart in some resentment as he asked her abruptly: —
“What does your husband do for a living?”
“Do—why, nothing.”
“Nothing? Great Scott! What sort of a man is he? When American men don’t work, even if they have money, we despise them. They generally have to, anyhow. If they inherit money they have to work to hang on to it. Some of them drink themselves to death, but they don’t count.”