Do come in, Mr. Sippy—your room is upstairs, just to the left. Bertram will help you with your bath. Dinner is at seven-thirty; I do hope you’ll dress. My father’s clothes should just fit you.”

Lady Cecily Snow spoke those surprising words to me as we entered the great hall of the huge granite pile, all turrets and towers, known as Winds’ Hill. Lady Snow herself—her humor was in the main rather vinegary—scorned the name; she called the place Small Alp, in reference to the bare bump of earth thrust upward from the otherwise flat prairie on which the castle sat.

Isinglass clumped past her without a word, nor did she look at him. She was a beauty such as you’d expect to find in Scott or Bulwer: alabaster brow, dark ringlets in abundance, a complexion like rich cream, with a cinnamon freckle here and there, no doubt the work of the western sun. But Cecily Snow was in no one’s pages; she stood in front of me in a hall as large as one you’d find at Blenheim, wearing a long white muslin frock. The fingers of the hand she offered me were long and thin.

“Ma’am, I’m too filthy,” I said—it was no exaggeration, either; after all, I had just come from driving a wagonful of corpses.

But Lady Snow grasped my hand anyway, pressed it firmly, as we say in our books.

“Goodness, Mr. Sippy, I’ve seen dirt before,” she said. “We’re all very American here—no need for this formality.

“We’re all regular cowboys,” she added, though no one much less like a cowboy could be imagined. “How astonishing that you’ve come today, for I’ve just finished Did She Sin?”

Did She Sin?; or, The Desperate Game—it was another of my bitter domestic tales.

“Such a penetrating work,” Cecily said. “I’m afraid I shall have to be rather cautious with you—it’s plain you’ve a fine insight into the female heart.”

Then I swear she blushed, still pressing my hand, before she turned and sailed off down that great hall with its stags’ heads on the wall, its tiger skins on the floor, a warthog stuffed complete, and other trophies of empire and chase here and there. Why, there was even a hollowed-out elephant’s foot for holding the guests’ umbrellas, though I was the only guest and had no umbrella.

It was a moment I can never forget: standing filthy and covered with grit in that great hall, being told by a radiant young English beauty that I had a fine insight into the female heart.

The female heart? Benjamin J. Sippy? Did Benjamin J. Sippy know anything at all about the female heart? If so, which female heart? Did Dora have one?