Casteel 05 Web of Dreams Read Online Free Page B

in something else besides steamships and luxury liners, but he shook his head and replied that that was all he knew.
"The captain goes down with his ship," he told me.
    "Right, Princess?" I felt terrible for him, but Momma didn't seem upset or concerned at all. She thought the new Caribbean cruises would help. She said she had been encouraging him to start them for some time.
    "But like all men," she told me, "he hates to let a woman tell him what to do. Really," she said, "men never stop being little boys. They like to be babied and pampered, and they are always so stubborn."
    I listened to what she said, but I didn't think Daddy was so stubborn, except about his office at home. But everyone is stubborn about something, I thought. Momma was stubborn about a lot of things too, and when I asked her about that, she said it was a woman's prerogative to be difficult at times. She said that it made men appreciate women more.
    "Never let a man take you for granted," she advised. We were having this discussion on the way to Farthinggale Manor. Usually we had a driver take us places, but this time Momma wanted to drive herself.
    It was a very bright and unusually warm day. Daddy said we were having an extended Indian summer and if it continued like this, we wouldn't see snow until January. I hoped we would see it for Christmas. It made such a difference to hear the sound of sleigh bells or hear the singing of carols while snowflakes fell. When I mentioned that to Momma, she laughed and said, "Tony Tatterton is planning to have a Christmas party and if Tony Tatterton wants to see snow on Christmas and it hasn't snowed, he'll have it flown in."
    "He must be very, very rich!" I exclaimed. "When you feast your eyes on Farthy, and see the sports cars and Rolls-Royces, the Arabian horses and the grounds with the olympic-size pool, you'll understand why even that is an understatement," she said. We left the city and headed toward the ocean.
"Farthy? What's Farthy?"
"Oh," she laughed again, a thin, short laugh, the kind of sound people make when they are thinking of something quite private, something only they or someone close to them would appreciate. "It's Tony's nickname for his home. I told you, it's called Farthinggale Manor."
"It sounds like a storybook place. Only in stories do people name their homes."
"Oh no," Momma explained. "People with histories, with houses that have histories, really do name their homes. You'll see other grand estates, and I hope you'll meet these sorts of people more often now."
"Did you always want to live in a grand style, Momma, even when you were my age back in Texas?" I asked. I had never dreamed about living on an estate or going to parties with aristocratic people whose homes were so old and famous they had their own names like Tara in Gone With the Wind. Was I supposed to want these things? Or was this something that happens when you get older, more mature? I wondered.
"Hardly," Momma said. She laughed at a private thought again. "I wanted to live in a garret, be the lover of a poor poet in Paris and be a starving artist displaying her works along the iver Seine. At night I would sit at outdoor cafes and listen to naylover read his poetry to friends, but when I told my mother these things, she laughed and ridiculed them. She thought it was silly for me to want to be an artist. A woman had only one purpose in life--to be a wife and a mother."
"But couldn't she see how talented you were? Wasn't she proud of your paintings and drawings?" I asked, even though it was very hard for me to imagine Momma living in a garret and not having fine clothes and jewels and all her makeup.
"She didn't even want to look at them and yelled at me for spending too much time drawing or painting. My sisters were not above sabotaging something I had drawn or painted. You have no idea how I suffered when I was your age, Leigh."
How horrible, I thought, for your own mother to ignore you and not support you. Poor Momma, living