“She must be rather terrifying!”
“She has succeeded in terrifying Geoffrey, and I fancy with no regrets. He is having a tremendous flirtation with Molly Cardiff and is little at home.”
“And Nigel?”
“Still on a Swiss mountain top, writing another book. Of course he is in love with you still, poor dear!”
Julia was not displeased, but replied philosophically: “It’s well he’s not here, for I should want to talk to him, and I never could. Harold is insanely jealous.”
“Oh, that will wear off. They are all like that at first. Englishmen of our class are not provincial, whatever else they may be.”
But as Julia followed her downstairs to try on the newest models in hats, she felt that she had got no cheer out of the last observation. She had a foreboding that Harold would become worse instead of better.
XVII
It was the night of the 15th of March. Invitations had been sent out three weeks since for the great party, which on this date was to inaugurate the reopening of Kingsborough House. The footmen had been put into new livery, but although the reception-rooms on the first floor, long swathed in holland and cobwebs, had been aired, cleaned, and polished, Julia’s tentative suggestion that the heavy carpets, curtains, and furniture of the early Victorian era be replaced with the more enlightened art of to-day was received with a haughty and uncomprehending stare. Julia had not returned to the subject. Banishing her scruples, she threw all her energies and taste into the replenishment of her wardrobe. As Harold had announced in terms as final as the duke’s stare that he would take his wife to no dances, where other men would have the right to embrace her, she had confined her apocryphal expenditures to such gowns and their accessories as would be needed at afternoon and evening receptions, luncheons, and the races. The dinner gowns of her first trousseau, although many of them had been worn at the house parties, were “smartened up” by the invaluable Mrs. Toner, and looked fresh and new.
The maid had been dismissed and Julia stood before the mirror in her large gas-lit bedroom, looking herself over carefully, without and within. She had sent for France, and there must be no weak points in her courage.