MARTHA Beale tells the footman, then immediately regrets her decision as the man withdraws. The hastiness of her action seems both anxious and overt—as well as clumsy and unsophisticated. And I should be in the withdrawing room rather than the parlor, she reminds herself grimly. Father would never receive a guest here. Handsome though the space is, it doesn’t have the grandeur of the other. Besides, it seems … it seems too intimate. But she cannot call the footman back, and she can’t go running through the corridors of Beale House hoping to reach the better room before her visitor does, and so she sighs and sits, takes up the book she was reading, but finds her hands are trembling. She returns the volume to the table, then looks at the title as if noting for the first time what type of reading matter she has selected from her father’s library: Plutarch’s Lives. Oh dear! she thinks, oh dear, what a mistake! Her cheeks redden as she recognizes how overweening and unfeminine the choice seems.
