“Blacked-out parts? What about this one?”

“We didn’t get to read Lear at all. Although I’m not sure why. It seems lighthearted enough, too light.”

“Lighthearted! The third act is supposed to be bitter … terrifying. Do you remember when the king sang a little jig about being mad as the wind and the snow?”

“I didn’t like it.”

“Those lines are supposed to be howled, not sung—brilliant lines, spoken by a man who is howling mad: mad as the wind and the snow.”

Charlotte considered this in silence. “The verse too … it hops and leaps,” she said. “For instance, the king’s speech about old age was brilliant, but then that man, what is his name? Reginald—he seems to be speaking prose, not verse.”

Alex shuddered. “That’s because Reginald is an adornment that this ass of a stage manager decided to give to Shakespeare’s play. There’s no Reginald in the original.”

“How lucky you are,” Charlotte said regretfully. “We were forbidden to read so much.”

“Well, couldn’t you read the plays now?” Alex could never figure out what gently bred ladies did all day long. Men took care of investments and met their estate managers and gave speeches in Parliament, as well as boxing, gambling, and wenching. But what did women do? He remembered his mother counting the linen and carrying around food to the poor, but that was it.

“Oh, no,” Charlotte replied absently. “I work in the mornings and I never seem to have time for reading these days.”

“You work?”

Charlotte caught herself. She never talked with men about painting; they immediately fancied her as a water-colorist, painting sweet little wreaths of flowers onto paper bags.

Charlotte looked up into Alex’s face, a hint of a smile glimmering in her eyes. “Do you know that they wouldn’t even let us read all of Romeo and Juliet?”

Alex cast his mind back. They hadn’t acted the play at school; he couldn’t think of anything offhand that might need censoring.

Charlotte continued. “My friend Julia Brentorton—she’s now married and lives abroad—figured out that they excised precisely ten lines, all from Juliet’s epithalamium, you know, her soliloquy before Romeo climbs up the rope ladder to her window.”

“Of course!” Alex said, startled. “For he shall lie upon me like snow on a raven’s back, like day on night….”

Charlotte colored. She would look like snow if she lay on top of Alex’s chest; his skin was the color of dark honey. She jerked her thoughts away.

Alex was more interested in Charlotte’s mention of work. “What kind of work?” he asked bluntly.

Luckily at that moment Sophie reappeared, followed by a flock of admirers.