“I wonder if you ever saw my cousin Gaston,” a French girl once asked her as they sat at their desks. “He became very poor through ill living. He was quite without money and he went to America.”
“To New York?” inquired Bettina.
“I am not sure. The town is called Concepcion.”
“That is not in the United States,” Betty answered disdainfully. “It is in Chili.”
She dragged her atlas towards her and found the place.
“See,” she said. “It is thousands of miles from New York.” Her companion was a near-sighted, rather slow girl. She peered at the map, drawing a line with her finger from New York to Concepcion.
“Yes, they are at a great distance from one another,” she admitted, “but they are both in America.”
“But not both in the United States,” cried Betty. “French girls always seem to think that North and South America are the same, that they are both the United States.”
“Yes,” said the slow girl with deliberation. “We do make odd mistakes sometimes.” To which she added with entire innocence of any ironic intention. “But you Americans, you seem to feel the United States, your New York, to be all America.
Betty started a little and flushed. During a few minutes of rapid reflection she sat bolt upright at her desk and looked straight before her. Her mentality was of the order which is capable of making discoveries concerning itself as well as concerning others. She had never thought of this view of the matter before, but it was quite true. To passionate young patriots such as herself at least, that portion of the map covered by the United States was America. She suddenly saw also that to her New York had been America. Fifth Avenue Broadway, Central Park, even Tiffany’s had been “America.” She laughed and reddened a shade as she put the atlas aside having recorded a new idea. She had found out that it was not only Europeans who were local, which was a discovery of some importance to her fervid youth.
Because she thought so often of Rosalie, her attention was, during the passing years, naturally attracted by the many things she heard of such marriages as were made by Americans with men of other countries than their own. She discovered that notwithstanding certain commercial views of matrimony, all foreigners who united themselves with American heiresses were not the entire brutes primitive prejudice might lead one to imagine. There were rather one-sided alliances which proved themselves far from happy. The Cousin Gaston, for instance, brought home a bride whose fortune rebuilt and refurnished his dilapidated chateau and who ended by making of him a well-behaved and cheery country gentleman not at all to be despised in his amiable, if light-minded good nature and good spirits. His wife, fortunately, was not a young woman who yearned for sentiment. She was a nice-tempered, practical American girl, who adored French country life and knew how to amuse and manage her husband. It was a genial sort of menage and yet though this was an undeniable fact, Bettina observed that when the union was spoken of it was always referred to with a certain tone which conveyed that though one did not exactly complain of its having been undesirable, it was not quite what Gaston might have expected. His wife had money and was good-natured, but there were limitations to one’s appreciation of a marriage in which husband and wife were not on the same plane.
“She is an excellent person, and it has been good for Gaston,” said Bettina’s friend. “We like her, but she is not—she is not–-” She paused there, evidently seeing that the remark was unlucky. Bettina, who was still in short frocks, took her up.
“What is she not?” she asked.
“Ah!—it is difficult to explain—to Americans. It is really not exactly a fault. But she is not of his world.”
“But if he does not like that,” said Bettina coolly, “why did he let her buy him and pay for him?”
It was young and brutal, but there were times when the business perspicuity of the first Reuben Vanderpoel, combining with the fiery, wounded spirit of his young descendant, rendered Bettina brutal. She saw certain unadorned facts with unsparing young eyes and wanted to state them. After her frocks were lengthened, she learned how to state them with more fineness of phrase, but even then she was sometimes still rather unsparing.
In this case her companion, who was not fiery of temperament, only coloured slightly.
“It was not quite that,” she answered. “Gaston really is fond of her. She amuses him, and he says she is far cleverer than he is.”
But there were unions less satisfactory, and Bettina had opportunities to reflect upon these also. The English and Continental papers did not give enthusiastic, detailed descriptions of the marriages New York journals dwelt upon with such delight. They were passed over with a paragraph. When Betty heard them spoken of in France, Germany or Italy, she observed that they were not, as a rule, spoken of respectfully. It seemed to her that the bridegrooms were, in conversation, treated by their equals with scant respect. It appeared that there had always been some extremely practical reason for the passion which had led them to the altar. One generally gathered that they or their estates were very much out at elbow, and frequently their characters were not considered admirable by their relatives and acquaintances. Some had been rather cold shouldered in certain capitals on account of embarrassing little, or big, stories. Some had spent their patrimonies in riotous living. Those who had merely begun by coming into impoverished estates, and had later attenuated their resources by comparatively decent follies, were of the more desirable order. By the time she was nineteen, Bettina had felt the blood surge in her veins more than once when she heard some comments on alliances over which she had seen her compatriots glow with affectionate delight.
“It was time Ludlow married some girl with money,” she heard said of one such union. “He had been playing the fool ever since he came into the estate. Horses and a lot of stupid women. He had come some awful croppers during the last ten years. Good-enough looking girl, they tell me—the American he has married—tremendous lot of money. Couldn’t have picked it up on this side. English young women of fortune are not looking for that kind of thing. Poor old Billy wasn’t good enough.’
Bettina told the story to her father when they next met. She had grown into a tall young creature by this time. Her low, full voice was like a bell and was capable of ringing forth some fine, mellow tones of irony
“And in America we are pleased,” she said, “and flatter ourselves that we are receiving the proper tribute of adoration of our American wit and beauty. We plume ourselves on our conquests.
“No, Betty,” said her father, and his reflective deliberation had meaning. “There are a lot of us who don’t plume ourselves particularly in these days. We are not as innocent as we were when this sort of thing began. We are not as innocent as we were when Rosy was married.” And he sighed and rubbed his forehead with the handle of his pen. “Not as innocent as we were when Rosy was married,” he repeated.
Bettina went to him and slid her fine young arm round his neck. It was a long, slim, round arm with a wonderful power to caress in its curves. She kissed Vanderpoel’s lined cheek.
“Have you had time to think much about Rosy?” she said.
“I’ve not had time, but I’ve done it,” he answered. “Anything that hurts your mother hurts me. Sometimes she begins to cry in her sleep, and when I wake her she tells me she has been dreaming that she has seen Rosy.”