"Oh — it's perfect," Jules said sincerely. She did have a habit of running out of ink at the most inconvenient moments. She just got too caught up in what she was doing and forgot to check the level and then three hours later she'd be just at the most important thrust of a chapter and be left scratching at the parchment with a dry nub. This might not last a full year, with the amount of writing that she did, but it was an incredibly thoughtful gift even so.

"Now if only you could find one that managed to keep wet ink off my sleeves, too," she joked, holding up a wrist quickly to indicate where she'd received her latest stain. The poor laundry woman at the Binns house hated her, between the ink stains on her sleeves and the crumbs in her pockets.

On the subject of her "novel," Juliana flushed slightly. "It's not that kind of writing," she insisted, though she had told Camilla this already. "It's nothing that would excite you at all, I promise."