II
‘Find it?’ asked Lady Matilda, when her nephew returned to the whitedrawing-room, as her sitting-room¹ was usually called. ‘Interesting face,isn’t it?’
‘Yes, quite handsome, too.’
‘It’s much better to be interesting than handsome. But you haven’t beenin Hungary or Austria, have you? You wouldn’t meet anyone like her outin Malaya? She wouldn’t be sitting around a table there making little notesor correcting speeches or things like that. She was a wild creature, by allaccounts. Lovely manners and all the rest of it. But wild. Wild as a wildbird. She didn’t know what danger was.’
‘How do you know so much about her?’
‘Oh, I agree I wasn’t a contemporary of hers, I wasn’t born until severalyears after she was dead. All the same, I’ve always been interested in her.
She was adventurous², you know. Very adventurous. Very queer storieswere told about her, about things she was mixed up in.’
‘And how did my great-great-great-grandfather react to that?’
‘I expect it worried him to death,’ said Lady Matilda. ‘They say he wasdevoted to her, though. By the way, Staffy, did you ever read The Prisonerof Zenda?’
‘Prisoner of Zenda? Sounds very familiar.’
‘Well, of course it’s familiar, it’s a book.’
‘Yes, yes, I realize it’s a book.’
‘You wouldn’t know about it, I expect. After your time. But when I was agirl– that’s about the first taste of romance we got. Not pop singers orBeatles. Just a romantic novel. We weren’t allowed to read novels when Iwas young. Not in the morning anyway. You could read them in the after-noon.’
‘What extraordinary rules,’ said Sir Stafford. ‘Why is it wrong to readnovels in the morning and not in the afternoon?’
‘Well, in the mornings, you see, girls were supposed to be doing some-thing useful. You know, doing the flowers or cleaning the silver photo-graph frames. All the things we girls did. Doing a bit of studying with thegoverness–all that sort of thing. In the afternoon we were allowed to sitdown and read a story book and The Prisoner of Zenda was usually one ofthe first ones that came our way.’
‘A very nice, respectable story, was it? I seem to remember somethingabout it. Perhaps I did read it. All very pure, I suppose. Not too sexy?’
‘Certainly not. We didn’t have sexy books. We had romance. The Pris-oner of Zenda was very romantic. One fell in love, usually, with the hero,Rudolf Rassendyll.’

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