“Everybody’s waiting for you, Charles,” she added. “Yes,” said Mrs. Prinsep, guessing that Margaret disliked Olivia’s prompting. “Captain Margaret will tell us all the news.” Captain Margaret asked Mrs. Prinsep if he might hand her a sapadillo. “I’m anxious to hear the news,” she answered. “No, thank you.” “Oh,” said Margaret lightly, as he put the letter in his pocket, “I won’t read the letter during dinner. I’ve been meaning to ask you, Mrs. Prinsep, how you keep domestic servants here, with such a scarcity of white women.” “I’d rather hear what the letter says,” she answered, “than talk about servants. We get so little news here from England.” “I don’t understand the craving for news,” said Perrin. “One carries the world in one’s head.” “You must want a big head to do that,” said Mrs. Prinsep. “It doesn’t matter what size it is, so long as it’s empty. Why read letters and gazettes when one can read imaginative work?” Mrs. Prinsep remarked with bitterness that she knew not what imaginative work meant, unless it was a kind of thing which she disliked very much. She half rose, catching Olivia’s eye. The two ladies left the room--Mrs. Prinsep to abuse Perrin and to apply crudely an examination; Olivia to suffer from home-sickness, thinking of her uncle’s letter. Mrs. Prinsep could draw little from her; for Mrs. Prinsep, while suspecting something wrong, naturally suspected a woman of finer beauty than her own of being a party to it. Her theory was that Olivia had run away from her home, and that, being beautiful, she was possibly not correctly married. She liked Stukeley; but she had her duty to herself to consider. She put Olivia through a conventional catechism, in the course of which she asked for particulars of the wedding. Olivia, seeing her drift, replied coldly, in monosyllables. Meanwhile, in the dining-room, over the wine, Stukeley badgered Margaret to read the letter. “Read it,” he kept saying. “Read it. Let’s hear what’s in it.” Howard wondered at his tone; but as he knew something of Stukeley’s affairs, he drew Lewin out of the room, so that the voyagers might read the letter together undisturbed. When he had gone, Margaret opened the packet brought by Lewin. Stukeley picked up his wine-glass and crossed over towards Margaret, so that he, too, might read. “What do you want, Stukeley?” Margaret asked him. “I want to read that letter, of course. It’s about me.” “Do you generally read the letters of others?” “I’m going to read this.”