"No, dear, that could never be; but I want you to have your butterfly season."
It was while she was with her friend that they came upon the villa above Porto Maurizio. Grace fell in love with the spot because, although near the high-road to Genoa, it lay off the beaten track, and was purely Italian—no Swiss-German hotel, no English tourists. The villa was out of repair, and by no means beautiful; but some extent of land went with it—olive woods, lemon groves, old, old mulberry trees, festooned with vines that were looped from tree to tree, banks of carnations, a wilderness of roses.
Lady Perivale sent for the owner's agent, and bought land and villa as easily as she would have bought a bonnet. The agent saw her child-like eagerness for a new toy, and only asked twice as much as the reserve price.
"It is a place that can be made anything in the hands of an owner of taste and means," he said; "and if you find the land a burden you can always let it on the métairie system."
"But I mean to keep the land, and employ people—to have my own olive woods, my own oranges and lemons."
She smiled, remembering a nursery game of her childhood. Oranges and lemons! Never had she thought to see them growing on sunlit heights, sloping upward from a sapphire sea, to that dark line where the olives cease and the pines begin, darker and darker, till they touch the rugged edge of far-off snow-peaks.
It was three years before Lady Perivale went back to the world in which everybody's business—barring the few who live for politics or philanthropy—is to cram the utmost amusement into the shortest space of time. The briefer the season the faster the pace. Three balls a night. Mrs. A.'s concert jostling with Mrs. B.'s private theatricals, and both of them crushed under the Juggernaut car of her Grace's fancy ball. The longer the invitation the worse chance of a dull party: for those duchesses and marchionesses can spring a great entertainment on the town at a fortnight's notice, and empty meaner people's dancing-rooms, and leave the Coldstreams or the Hungarians fiddling to twenty couples in a house where there is breathing space everywhere.
Lady Perivale felt as if she were awaking from a long dream of beautiful places and tranquil hours, awaking in the din and riot of a crowded fair. But she opened her own little booth with a proper dignity. She was almost glad to see old faces, and to be made a prodigious fuss about.
She was the rage in that season of her return. There was hardly a bachelor in town who did not want to marry her, though many were too wise to pursue the charming prey. Her girl-friends who had married, and her girl-friends who were still single, flocked round her, and her house was the rendezvous of all the pretty people in London. Her dinners, her luncheons, her little musical afternoons—a single artist, perhaps, or at most two, and a room only half full—but, most of all, her suppers after the play or the opera were the top of the mode.
"She spends her money on the things that are best worth having," Mr. Howard said of her, "and that alone is genius. She breakfasts on an egg, and dines on a cutlet, but she has taken the trouble to secure an incomparable cook, and she gives him carte blanche. She drinks nothing stronger than salutaris, but she lets me order her wine, and gives me a free hand, as she does Herr Ganz when he organizes her concerts. Such a woman knows how to live."