“I supposed I hoped you weren’t frivolous,” she said tartly, as we were riding home the second day.

Her tartness had not diminished much when she came to my bed that night. Conscious of being somewhat in disfavor, I became rather nervous and faltered a bit at the outset; though the event was soon rescued, at least to some extent, Lady Snow was conspicuously bored.

“I call that meager coupling,” she said. “Not only are you frivolous, you’re quick.”

“I warned you I was a faltering old party,” I reminded her.

She usually left bed rather briskly, but this time, though somewhat disdainful and with a bit of a pout in her expression, she stayed, her long hair spread across my pillows.

“The old brute wants to breed me, you know.” she said. “Has in fact, twice.”

“Isinglass?” I asked, much surprised.

“I’m not a botanist for nothing, though,” Cecily said. “I’ve sworn never to bear his child. There was an old Comanche woman here when we came. She showed me quite a useful plant. It’s sick-making, but one loses the fetus very quickly.”

“My father’s great passion was genetics,” she went on. “It’s what brought him to Texas in the first place. He and the old brute thought they could breed buffalo with cattle—in fact old Willie is still doing it. They thought they’d produce the perfect animal for this new country. My father was a sound biologist in some ways, but he had no depth in genetics—there he was rather an amateur. My own studies with the mollusks went farther than his.”

“So it didn’t work out with the buffalo?” I asked.

“You can see for yourself,” she said. “We’ve got a little museum of failures here—someday, if you have the curiosity, I’ll take you. The only things not in it which ought to be are my half-brothers—the results of the old brute’s efforts with my mother.”

Then she laughed, a lilting laugh.

“The old brute is a worse geneticist than my father was,” she said. “He supposed my mother would give him the perfect child, but he failed to consider that my mother had more than a dollop of rather weary Spanish blood. If my brothers had been born in Spain they would simply have been shut up in some dim room in the Escorial and never seen again, except by servants.”

“Where are they?” I asked. No doubt there were plenty of dim rooms in Winds’ Hill.

“Cabins here and there, in remote places,” Cecily said. “Unless the poor goggle-eyed little creatures have died already, which would probably be a blessing.”

“You’re not much of a sentimentalist, are you, Cecily?” I said. She spoke with more feeling for the plants she studied than for her parents or her brothers.

“I ain’t, for a fact,” she said. “Am I to understand that to be a complaint?”