Empire Read Free Page B

newspaper on EARTH .” “And Blaise delights in Mr. Hearst,” said Caroline. “And I delight in hearing about Mr. Hearst.”
    “But you’ve never met him?”
    “No. No. He is not to be met, I gather. He goes to Rector’s with actresses.
Two
very young actresses, I am told. Sisters.”
    “He is a cad.” Del said the final word; there would be no appeal.
    “So why does Blaise want to work for him?”
    This time Del’s smile was more grown-up and knowing: the baby teeth unrevealed by smooth lips. “Oh, Miss Sanford, has no one told you yet about power?”
    “I read Julius Caesar’s handbook in school. I know all about it. Youstart at first light and then, by forced marches, you surprise the enemy and kill them. Then you write a book about what you’ve done.”
    “Well, the newspapers are now the book you write. Blaise has simply taken a shortcut. He has gone straight to the end-result.”
    “But isn’t it better—if that’s what you want—to win a war first?”
    “But that’s exactly what Mr. Hearst has done, or thinks he’s done. All those stories of his about how the Spanish blew up our battleship.”
    “Didn’t they?”
    “Probably not, according to Father. But it’s the way that things are made to look that matters now. Anyway, Blaise is in the midst of it. He wants to be powerful. We all noticed that.”
    “Don’t you?”
    “I’m far too easy-going. I’d rather marry, and be happy, like my father.”
    “But the Ambassador has always been at the center of—forced marches at first light.”
    Del laughed. “It was the others who got up early to do the marching. Father just wrote the book.”
    “Ten volumes, in fact.” Caroline had yet to meet anyone who had been able to read all the way through the ten-volume life of Abraham Lincoln by John Hay and his fellow secretary to the President, J. G. Nicolay. Caroline had not even made the attempt. The Civil War had no interest for her, while Lincoln himself seemed as remote as Queen Elizabeth, and rather less interesting. But then she had been brought up on Saint-Simon, in whose bright pages there were no saints with stovepipe hats making sententious appeals to the Almighty, only a king who was compared, quite rightly, to the sun, in bed and out.
    Mrs. Cameron appeared on the terrace. “Del!” she called. “Your father wants you. He’s in the library.” She went inside.
    “What,” asked Caroline, as they returned to the house, “are the Five of Hearts?”
    “Where did you hear about that?”
    “I saw some letter-paper. I asked Mrs. Cameron. She was mysterious.”
    “Well, don’t mention the subject to Mr. Adams, ever.”
    “Then he must be a Heart?”
    “It was long ago,” was all that Del said.
    Caroline returned to her room; and dressed for lunch. She had come to Kent without a maid; old Marguerite had gone to Vichy to take the waters. In the past, Caroline had always travelled with a mademoiselle,who was half governess and half maid. But now, in her twenty-first year, Caroline was an orphan; and she could do as she pleased. The problem was that she was not certain where pleasure for her might ultimately lie. In any case, until the Sanford estate was settled, she was in limbo. And so she had chosen to spend August with Del and his family at the “summer embassy,” presided over by the Camerons and the
Porcupinus Angelicus
, their name for Henry Adams, who was indeed prickly as a porcupine if not always much like an angel.
    But, happily, Adams was now in a celestial mood, at least with Caroline, who found him alone in the yellow drawing room, so called because, with age, the frayed green damask on the walls had turned a sickly yellow, made even sicklier by the contrast with the heavily gilded—and dusty—furniture. Was dusty to be emblematic of the state of an English August, or merely her own state of mind?
    Henry Adams was shorter than Caroline; and she was less than Amazonian. At sixty, Adams, grandson and great-grandson of