Page 61 of Heiress Gone Wild

“And did the course live up to your expectations?”

“I loved it. And I was good, too,” she added proudly. “The instructor said I had a true talent. But—” She broke off and swallowed hard. “I gave it up.”

“Why? Not because of anything to do with your father, I hope?”

She shook her head. “The photographer offered to apprentice me—outside my studies, of course—but Mrs. Forsyte refused to allow it. She didn’t think it appropriate.”

“I can’t think why. Women have been taking up photography for decades. It’s not considered unwomanly.”

“Perhaps not, but you’d probably have agreed with her reasons. The photographer was an unmarried man. It was absurd,” she added at once. “The poor man had no designs on me. He was sixty if he was a day, and I was only fifteen.”

“Still,” he began.

“Oh, I know,” she agreed at once. “One must observe the proprieties or tongues will wag.” She shot a meaningful glance in his direction. “At least, that’s what people keep telling me.”

He smiled. “As your guardian, I am duty-bound to agree with Mrs. Forsyte that it would not have been proper to be that man’s apprentice. But as your friend...” He paused, his smile fading. “I’m sorry you had to abandon something you loved for the sake of propriety.”

She shrugged, forcing aside past disappointments. “It’s all right. I have a different dream for my life now, so it doesn’t matter.”

“On the contrary,” he said. “It does matter. It matters to you.”

The quiet certainty in his voice startled her, and she stopped walking, but she couldn’t quite look at him. “What makes you say that?”

He stopped beside her, bending a bit to look under her hat brim and into her eyes. “Because when you said you had to give it up, you looked like a dying duck in a thunderstorm.”

Marjorie couldn’t help laughing at his way of putting it. “A dying duck? You British have the strangest expressions.”

“Given the look on your face a few minutes ago, the metaphor was appropriate. And if you want to take up photography again, you needn’t worry about any objections from me, and I’m sure Irene would approve. And you certainly wouldn’t have to worry about what Mrs. Forsyte would think of it.”

“Thank goodness for that,” she said wryly.

“Was it very bad?” he asked, grimacing. “At Forsyte Academy?”

“Awful,” she said at once, striving not to smile at his abashed expression. “Like a workhouse in a Dickens novel.” She shook her head with a sigh of long suffering. “And you expected me to stay there.”

His lips twitched. His shoulders relaxed. “Only for eight more months.”

“During which I’d have died of boredom. It’s true,” she insisted as he made a skeptical sound. “Everyone was very kind, and everything was very proper and staid and so damnably boring. When I was a student, it wasn’t so bad, for I had my friends, and we’d get up to a bit of mischief now and again.”

“You?” He grinned. “I’m shocked.”

“I never got into any serious trouble,” she assured him. “Just silly stuff—sneaking out sometimes, pranks, smoking cigarettes, that sort of thing. But once I became a teacher, there was no more fun of that kind. A teacher at Forsyte Academy,” she intoned in an excellent imitation of the school’s headmistress, “must set a proper example for her students and be impeccable in her conduct at all times.” She sighed. “It was very dull.”

Jonathan chuckled. “I can see how you might find it so.”

“Exactly. Which is why I came up with a more exciting plan for my life.”

He gave her a dubious look. “You think being married to a British peer and living on a country estate will be exciting?”

“More exciting than teaching girls to curtsy and speak French,” she countered at once.

“I’ll grant you that, especially since you intend to spend all your money on furs and jewels and extravagant house parties.”

“I was teasing you about that part,” she admitted. “But the main reason for my choice was that I knew I wanted to be married and have children of my own, and there was no way that would ever happen if I stayed teaching at Forsyte.”

“Because schoolteachers can’t be married?”

“And because I’d never meet any men there. So, I had to do something.” She paused, swallowing hard. “You see, I’d figured out by then that my father was never going to let me join him. And don’t you dare make excuses for him,” she added as he opened his mouth to reply.

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