The Double Wager Read Online Free PDF Page B

wear each of them just once.
    “Why do I need ten ball gowns, for heaven’s sake?” she asked, appalled. “Won’t one last me for the few months until summer?”
    Madame Celeste allowed a superior smile to settle on her sallow features while Marian raised her eyes to the ceiling and struggled to hold on to her ladylike patience.
    “My dear Henrietta,” she said, “we shall be attending many balls, given by some of the most influential members of the ton. Your brother and I move in the highest circles, you know. It would be quite unthinkable to wear the same gown more than twice at the most in one year. Everyone would think you must be a pauper, my dear. And we would never find a gentleman to make an offer for you.”
    “And is that the purpose of all this fuss and fluster?” Henry asked, one arm indicating the jumbled mass of patterns, bolts of fabric, and cards of ribbons and lace strewn everywhere. “Am I to be put on the market for the highest bidder?”
    “Really, Henrietta,” Marian replied sternly, “I am trying my best to make you look like a lady. I would ask you to make an effort to speak like one, too. Of course it must be the aim of any young lady of breeding to find herself a suitable husband. What else is there?”
    Henry was about to argue the point, but remembering a certain wager that she was determined to win, she shut her mouth with an audible clacking of the teeth.
    She endured the seemingly endless spell of standing on a low stool while Madame Celeste measured and pinned, poked and prodded. Then she sat in gloomy silence for the remaining time period while her sister-in-law and the dressmaker discussed styles and fabrics and trimmings ad nauseam. Only once did she express an opinion.
    “Not pink,” she declared.
    Marian looked doubtful. “You are probably right, Henrietta,” she agreed. “Pink might clash with your hair.”
    “I don’t care about that,” Henry declared, “but pink is for girls!”
    Marian wisely refrained from comment.
    The tedium of the fitting session over, Henry breathed a sigh of relief and announced her intention of going outside for a walk. A loud argument ensued when Marian forbade her to set so much as a nose out of doors until the first of her clothes should have arrived two days later. Henry lost the argument.
    She would, she felt, have gone quite mad at the tedium of the day had one incident not brightened it up. Little Timothy’s nurse could be heard shrieking in near hysteria abovestairs. Henry was sitting in the drawing room at the time busily employed with shaking her foot back and forth and counting how many shakes it took before the slipper flew off. Marian was also there, working some embroidery.
    The latter leapt to her feet first and rushed for the nursery whence the sounds were proceeding. Henry followed at a more leisurely pace. Daily crises in the Tallant home had conditioned her not to panic too easily.
    The scene that met her eyes when she reached the nursery door delighted her greatly. The twins were busily examining the baby’s toys while the toddler himself was on the floor tangled up in the reclining body of Brutus and having his face thoroughly licked. The child was chuckling with merriment. Oscar was perched on the headboard of the gently rocking cradle, viewing the scene before him and repeating benignly, “Bless his boots!”
    By the time Henry lost interest in the scene and wandered back to the drawing room, the twins had been sent back to the schoolroom with their pets; Miss Manford, who had nodded asleep over some darning before the twins had made their escape, had been scolded; nurse, who had discovered the scene of horror on her return from a visit to the kitchen, had been left to soothe a howling baby, who had been deprived of his new toy; and Lady Tallant had been helped to her room by her lady’s maid and was resting quietly in the hope that she would be recovered in time for dinner.
    The outcome of the incident was that