out laughing.

"You're a daisy, Lady Betty," said he.

"Is it invidious to be a daisy?" I asked.

"I guess I must look in the dictionary for 'invidious'; but a daisy's a
flower that has budded in the green fields of England, where there
aren't any newspaper reporters or other strange bugs."

"Potter!" exclaimed Mrs. Ess Kay, "don't tease her; and when you've
been in the green fields of England you'll say _insects_, not--er--what
you _did_ say, if you don't want ladies to faint all around you on the
floor." Then she turned to me. "He means you're very innocent, because
you don't know what it is to be interviewed. But you must have _been_
it, all the same, for see here, in this dreadful _Flashlight_." And she
handed me a newspaper, with one page folded over, and huge headings
dotted about at the tops of paragraphs, like the lines of big print
that oculists keep to make you try your eyesight. In the middle column
I saw my name, but I couldn't believe it was really there, in an
American paper. I began to think I wasn't awake yet, and that this must
be part of the dream I was dreaming all yesterday.

"BONNY--BETTY--BULKELEY," I read out aloud. "A Duke's Daughter on the
Dock. Call Her by Her Front Name, Please. What Lady Betty Thinks of Our
Boys."

There was more, but when I had got so far, I simply gasped.

"How _dare_ they?"

"There isn't much they don't dare, except to go back without a
'story'," said Mr. Parker, laughing. But I didn't laugh. I was too
angry.

"If my brother were here, he'd kill them," I said.

"Then he hasn't got a sense of humour," replied Mr. Parker; "I don't
see how a Duke could have, and be a Duke nowadays; but I guess I
wouldn't mind swopping my sense of humour for a dukedom, all the same.
See here, Lady Betty, you'll get to like our newspapers before you've
been over here a month. They sort of grow on you. They're as
interesting as novels, and almost as true to life."

"This isn't true to my life, anyway," I said, not knowing whether I
wanted most to laugh or cry. "Oh, Sally, Sally _Woodburn_, will anybody
believe I said such things as these?"

"Give the _Flashlight_ to me and let me look," she said. And when she'd
taken the paper, she began to read the stuff that came under the big
headings, out aloud, in her pretty, soft voice.

"Yesterday was a blazer, but though it was hot enough on the docks to
roast a coon, when the Big Willie steamed in, that beautiful young
visitor to our sh