The buccaneers / by Edith Wharton.

THE BUCCANEERS

285

are foreign. And he hates anything foreign. There are
lots of things he's never done that he feels quite sure
he'd hate."
Guy was silent. Again he seemed to himself to be
eaves-dropping-unintentionally leading her on to say
more than she meant; and the idea troubled him.
He turned back to his study of the pictures. "Has it
ever occurred to you," he began again after a pause,
"that to enjoy them in their real beauty-"
"I ought to persuade Ushant to send them back where
they belong?"
"I didn't mean anything so drastic. But did it never
occur to you that if you had the courage to sweep away
all those... those touching little-er... family mementoes-" His gesture ranged across the closely covered
walls, from illuminated views of Vesuvius in action to
landscapes by the Dowager Duchess's great-aunts, funereal monuments worked in hair on faded silk, and
photographs in heavy oak frames of ducal relatives,
famous race-horses, Bishops in lawn sleeves, and undergraduates grouped about sporting trophies.
Annabel coloured, but with amusement, not annoyance. "Yes; it did occur to me; and one day I smuggled
in a ladder and took them all down-every one."
"By jove, you did? It must have been glorious."
"Yes; that was the trouble. The Duchess-"
She broke off, and he interposed, with an ironic lift to
the brows: "But you're the Duchess."
"Not the real one. You must have seen that already. I
don't know my part yet, and I don't believe I ever shall.
And my mother-in-law was so shocked that every single