The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton

ambassadress, of course. Lord Richard says that ambassadresses... Oh, darling, don’t stop! I do long to hear the rest.... I do, really....”
    Miss Testvalley resumed her recital, sinking her voice as she saw Nan’s lids gradually sink over her questioning eyes till at last the long lashes touched her cheeks. Miss Testvalley murmured on, ever more softly, to the end; then, blowing out the candle, she slid down to Nan’s side so softly that the sleeper did not move. “She might have been my own daughter,” the governess thought, composing her narrow frame to rest, and listening in the darkness to Nan’s peaceful breathing.
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Miss Testvalley did not fall asleep herself. She was speculating rather nervously over the meaning of her pupil’s hysterical burst of giggling. She was delighted that Lord Richard had succeeded in getting invitations to the ball for Virginia and Lizzy Elmsworth; but she could not understand why Nan regarded his having done so as particularly droll. Probably, she reflected, it was because the invitations had been asked for and obtained without Mrs. St. George’s knowledge. Everything was food for giggles when that light-hearted company were together, and nothing amused them more than to play a successful trick on Mrs. St. George. In any case, the girls had had their evening—and a long evening it must have been, since the late-November dawn was chilling the windows when Miss Testvalley at length heard Virginia on the stairs. Lord Richard Marable, as it turned out, had underrated his family’s interest in his projected marriage. No doubt, as Miss Testvalley had surmised, his announcement of the event had been late in reaching them; but the day before the wedding a cable came. It was not, however, addressed to Lord Richard, or to his bride, but to Miss Testvalley, who, having opened it with surprise (for she had never before received a cable), read it in speechless perplexity.
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IS SHE BLACK HIS ANGUISHED MOTHER SELINA BRIGHTLINGSEA
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For some time the governess pored in vain over this cryptic communication; but at last light came to her, and she leaned her head back against her chair and laughed. She understood just what must have happened. Though there were two splendid globes, terrestrial and celestial, at opposite ends of the Allfriars library, no one in the house had ever been known to consult them; and Lady Brightlingsea’s geographical notions, even measured by the family standard, were notoriously hazy. She could not imagine why anyone should ever want to leave England, and her idea of the continent was one enormous fog from which two places called Paris and Rome indistinctly emerged; while the whole Western Hemisphere was little more clear to her than to the forerunners of Columbus. But Miss Testvalley remembered that on one wall of the Vandyke saloon, where the family sometimes sat after dinner, there hung a great tapestry, brilliant in colour, rich and elaborate in design, in the foreground of which a shapely young Negress flanked by ruddy savages and attended by parakeets and monkeys was seen offering a tribute of tropical fruits to a lolling divinity. The housekeeper, Miss Testvalley also remembered, in showing this tapestry to visitors, on the day when Allfriars was open to the public, always designated it as “The Spanish Main and the Americas”—and what could be more natural than that poor bewildered Lady Brightlingsea should connect her son’s halting explanations with this instructive scene?
    Miss Testvalley pondered for a long time over her reply; then, for once forgetting to make a “governess’s answer,” she cabled back to Lady Brightlingsea: NO, BUT COMELY.

BOOK TWO

VIII.
    On a June afternoon of the year 1875, one of the biggest carriages in London drew up before one of the smallest houses in Mayfair—the very smallest in that exclusive quarter, its occupant, Miss Jacqueline