Victoria Wotton was browsing through her husband's library, which she seldom did. Many of the spines she ran her fingers over were crisply incised with gilt titles, most of them in French. She read French badly, from lack of practice.
Her governess Mrs. Green had been a patient and amiable woman, but Victoria in those days had much preferred wandering the garden to focusing squarely on a dull page in a primer. She had "wandered, lonely as a cloud" through the garden, taken long walks on the country estate, mostly by herself. The young Victoria had admired her figure in her mind's eye: how romantic she must look, with her strong long steps, rosy cheeks, and prettily dissheveled hair.
The garden had become entirely hers on her mother's death, hers to tend as she wished. Mrs. Green had complained at its disorder, but her father had humored his little dryad, as he called her. The young Victoria had cultivated the most delightful natural weeds alongside roses and daisies. Even now the humid lips of orchids had no appeal to her, when compared with the splendor of daffodils in their native soil. Harry, on the other hand, was possessed of a mad fancy for orchids...
She had her own mad fancies, but she fancied they were more sincere.
She admired sincerity. The sincerity of real passion—that, for instance, which made pianists so fascinating, as they plied their rapture over the keys. The sincerity of old friends. (Victoria was naturally sociable, for the most part.) The sincerity of real flowers…There was something very false about orchids. Beside which, they were so expensive.
Yes, Victoria was sincere, but she never pretended to be sensible. She had married an honest man, but not a sincere one.
It had seemed romantic at the time.
She seldom entered the library, because it was stifling and stiflingly his. As her fingers traveled from book-spine to book-spine, a marble satyr and bacchante cavorted at her elbow; she felt trapped in a heavy world of blue china, cream-colored frieze, elaborately raised plasterwork, silk and Persian rugs.
That is not to say that she did not read. She loved her Scott with his Waverly and Ivanhoe. The Brontës enchanted her, Emily in particular. Victor Hugo she adored (in translation). Byron was not her favorite poet (too sarcastic), but she admired him at times. Only, he had acted horribly with Lady Caroline Lamb. Victoria had an engraving of that lady in her room, above her bed. It had been based on a color miniature in which that lady was jauntily holding a tray of grapes above her shoulder. Half woman, half boy, Lady Caroline looked down coolly but the traces of ardor were by no means absent from her face. She had not seen him often, but her husband's new friend—Mr. Gray, was it? Goodness, but Harry had so many photographs of him!—reminded her somewhat of Lady Caroline.
After a few minutes of appraisal and idle musing, she stopped on a book that would not otherwise have interested her, because she noticed that its faded yellow spine had been creased several times over, and deeply. She took it down and read: A Rebours. For some reason, it intrigued her.
She flicked it open and turned randomly to a page, whereupon she was further intrigued to discover that the page had been dog-earred. She gave a shrill laugh that contained real delight. Was it Harry's grimoire, perhaps?
Victoria made a serious try to enjoy A Rebours, and indeed she found it very amusing in parts. She liked especially the passages that Harry had underscored with his light lazy hand. But after an hour sprawled on the sofa her buttocks became quite numb, her stays were digging into her poor ribcage, and the infernal ticking of the Louis Quatorze clock on the mantel had begun to distract her. Too much time in Harry's sumptuous little room often had the effect of making her dizzy.
So she got up and took a turn in the garden, but not before replacing the novel ever so carefully in its ascribed place. Why should Harry know that she had seen it? She saw no reason...
The music of a dozen songbirds in the trees, the cool breezes that stirred the hair on the back of her neck and her faded green shawl, the blotting out of the sun by passing clouds, the scent of fresh grass enchanted her. She yawned and stretched out her arms with a gauche, ambsent-minded grace.
Returning inside, she decided to find another book.
She settled on a little black one, off in the dark corner of the farthest bookcase. Harry would not miss it, but it gave her a thrill to be nabbing it. She opened to the title page and read: Chansons de Bilitis. Twenty pages in, she was quite enchanted. So she took it up to her room and completed it in fierce gulps, under the ardent gaze of Lady Caroline.