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gracefully raised to her lips. The elegant couturier gown of Valenciennes lace was a dramatic departure from her leather leggings and red wool shirt of the past hour. Only a faint fragrance of pine lingered in her hair as reminder of her afternoon escape into the mountains.
    "You don't mind?" Empress was saying, seated across from her in a
fauteuil
of gently mellowed pastel needlepoint.
    "No," Daisy lied, setting her cup down. "Paris is at its best this time of year." It was an obliging statement of good manners to bolster her lie. "With luck the legal changes shouldn't take more than a few weeks."
    "I'm so pleased. Trey said you'd go, but I knew you weren't overly fond of—well… the fashionable world." Empress spoke with a delicate touch of her native French underscoring the rhythm of her phrasing. The antithesis of her sister-in-law in coloring, she was all golden tones and peach skin, her beauty one of sunrises or springtime redolent of apple-blossom-laden branches—sweetly pure and lush.
    "If I can keep Adelaide in check, I'll survive." Daisy smiled as she spoke, confident of her own abilities to restrain their friend Adelaide's sense of mission as a hostess. A second later her smile broadened as she caught sight of the nursemaid entering the room bringing in her goddaughter Solange.
    Fair like her mother, the baby puckered her tiny face into the fretful rosy-pink preliminary to a lusty howl. Reaching up to take her daughter from the young nursemaid, Empress greeted Solange with a smile and a cooing flow of words, calming her long enough to swiftly undo the crystal buttons of her gown. Settling her daughter at her breast immediately quieted the baby's flailing arms and legs, contented little grunts of satisfaction instantly replacing her agitation.
    "She nurses all the time," Empress said with motherly pride, gazing at her daughter for a moment to assure herself she was comfortable, "which accounts for her size. Trey says if she sustains this appetite she's going to be as tall as he when she's grown."
    A tall woman herself, Daisy thought her brother was probably right, considering the aspects his daughter had inherited. "She can compete with her brother Max then in the outdoor games."
    "Did you like that?" While Empress had lived her adolescent years in the mountains, she'd not had the advantage of the Absarokee dedication to riding and outdoor sports.
    "Competition is exhilarating; winning more so," Daisy admitted with a grin. "Being raised with three brothers sharpened my athletic abilities and fighting skills. I don't make a very demure wallflower." But that same competitive spirit had made her less vulnerable to those feminine romantic infatuations her friends gossiped and giggled about. Perhaps if she'd been more susceptible to those giddy girlish emotions, the men in her life would have played a more substantive role—and she too would have a baby nestled at her breast. The sight of Empress and her daughter occasioned a small twinge of envy. Would she ever find someone she loved enough to marry? Would Martin have filled the void she suddenly felt gazing at the poignant scene of mother and child?
    "Speaking of wallflowers…" Empress casually declared, "brings Sally Newcombe to mind. Martin stopped by your office, I hear. Would you ever have married him?" Empress asked as if reading Daisy's mind.
    "I kept thinking… I would," Daisy slowly replied, aware, even as she uttered the words, of the improbability of that action. Somehow she couldn't picture Martin as the necessary complement to her wishful image of mother and child. And with the exception of a mild irritation at the abruptness of his marriage, she felt no stabbing jealousy or loss. Even the swiftness of his marriage was recognizable in practical terms. Raised in a politically conscious home, Daisy was sensibly aware of pragmatic, expedient behavior.
    "But…" Empress prompted with Daisy's sentence left incomplete, curious about the state of her