Mabel, who seemed excited to the point of exhilaration, chattered incessantly.
“Oh, Jackie! Jackie!” she cried, as the servants finally left the room, “how simply wonderful this castle must be when it is full of guests. Your mother says she has had more than a hundred people here at once. If you _won’t_ stay here, we must return some fall and have a regular traditional house party—royalties and all the rest of it. It would be exactly like living in one of Scott’s novels, and as the castle is Renaissance instead of Elizabethan, we could have a fancy dress ball and make believe we were in Italy.”
“The Renaissance reached England before Elizabeth,” replied Ordham, diplomatically. “It is too good of you to feel that you will not have tired of Italy before we can return here.”
“Oh, I love Italy, although I have malaria in Rome, and there are so many beggars, and my governess made me look at so many pictures. I am sure I can’t see what good those miles and miles of tramping through dark stuffy galleries full of madonnas and saints did me, for I only remember about three pictures in all Italy. I remember my headaches much better.”
“If you had a guide-book mind, there would be no room in it for anything else.” Ordham was very indulgent to this bride of nineteen short years who so often shot him a glance of sweet appeal, or prettily begged him not to be severe if he discovered that she did not know as much as he did. “How could a girl just out of school compete with quite the cleverest young man on earth?” He had already begun to wonder how he could have expected her to know anything, and still oftener how any woman could look such unutterable wisdom out of an apparently empty skull. That bony structure, which included a high intellectual brow, width between the eyes, and a fine decided nose, was merely the shell inherited from a long line of able Americans who had made history, political and financial. It was a perfect and a very roomy shell. He had also begun to ask himself how long it would take to furnish it, and if the process would be as interesting as he had fancied. But what mystified him more than all was that during those weeks of his courtship, conscious and unconscious, he should have believed her to be serious, studious, remote, vastly above her sex and age in all respects. Of course, he reflected, he was in love all the time—no doubt—and blind from the moment her beauty and grace had dazzled him in that incomparable setting. He knew now that Mabel had not progressed in her literary drudgeries beyond Scott and Macaulay, and had by no means exhausted those prolific authors; indeed, she openly yearned for abridged editions.