Title: An International Episode
Author: James, Henry
Language: English
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AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE

By Henry James



PART I


Four years ago--in 1874--two young Englishmen had occasion to go to the
United States. They crossed the ocean at midsummer, and, arriving in
New York on the first day of August, were much struck with the fervid
temperature of that city. Disembarking upon the wharf, they climbed
into one of those huge high-hung coaches which convey passengers to the
hotels, and with a great deal of bouncing and bumping, took their course
through Broadway. The midsummer aspect of New York is not, perhaps, the
most favorable one; still, it is not without its picturesque and even
brilliant side. Nothing could well resemble less a typical English
street than the interminable avenue, rich in incongruities, through
which our two travelers advanced--looking out on each side of them
at the comfortable animation of the sidewalks, the high-colored,
heterogeneous architecture, the huge white marble facades glittering
in the strong, crude light, and bedizened with gilded lettering, the
multifarious awnings, banners, and streamers, the extraordinary number
of omnibuses, horsecars, and other democratic vehicles, the vendors of
cooling fluids, the white trousers and big straw hats of the policemen,
the tripping gait of the modish young persons on the pavement, the
general brightness, newness, juvenility, both of people and things. The
young men had exchanged few observations; but in crossing Union Square,
in front of the monument to Washington--in the very shadow, indeed,
projected by the image of the PATER PATRIAE--one of them remarked to
the other, “It seems a rum-looking place.”

“Ah, very odd, very odd,” said the other, who was the clever man of the
two.

“Pity it’s so beastly hot,” resumed the first speaker after a pause.

“You know we are in a low latitude,” said his friend.

“I daresay,” remarked the other.

“I wonder,” said the second speaker presently, “if they can give one a
bath?”

“I daresay not,” rejoined the other.

“Oh, I say!” cried his comrade.

This animated discussion was checked by their arrival at the hotel,
which had been recommended to them by an American gentleman whose
acquaintance they made--with whom, indeed, they became very intimate--on
the steamer, and who had proposed to accompany them to the inn and
introduce them, in a friendly way, to the proprietor. This plan,
however, had been defeated by their friend’s finding that his “partner”
 was awaiting him on the wharf and that his commercial associate desired
him instantly to come and give his attention to certain telegrams
received from St. Louis. But the two Englishmen, with nothing but their
national prestige and personal graces to recommend them, were very well
received at the hotel, which had an air of capacious hospitality. They
found that a bath was not unattainable, and were indeed struck with
the facilities for prolonged and reiterated immersion with which their
apartment was supplied. After bathing a good deal--more, indeed, than
they had ever done before on a single occasion--they made their way into
the dining room of the hotel, which was a spacious restaurant, with a
fountain in the middle, a great many tall plants in ornamental tubs,
and an array of French waiters. The first dinner on land, after a sea
voyage, is, under any circumstances, a delightful occasion, and there
was something particularly agreeable in the circumstances in which our
young Englishmen found themselves. They were extremely good natured
young men; they were more observant than they appeared; in a sort of
inarticulate, accidentally dissimulative fashion, they were highly
appreciative. This was, perhaps, especially the case with the elder, who
was also, as I have said, the man of talent. They sat down at a little
table, which was a very different affair from the great clattering
seesaw in the saloon of the steamer. The wide doors and windows of the
restaurant stood open, beneath large awnings, to a wide pavement, where
there were other plants in tubs, and rows of spreading trees, and beyond
which there was a large shady square, without any palings, and with
marble-paved walks. And above the vivid verdure rose other facades of
white marble and of pale chocolate-colored stone, squaring themselves
against the deep blue sky. Here, outside, in the light and the shade
and the heat, there was a great tinkling of the bells of innumerable
streetcars, and a constant strolling and shuffling and rustling of
many pedestrians, a large proportion of whom were young women in
Pompadour-looking dresses. Within, the place was cool and vaguely
lighted, with the plash of water, the odor of flowers, and the flitting
of French waiters, as I have said, upon soundless carpets.

“It’s rather like Paris, you know,” said the younger of our two
travelers.

“It’s like Paris--only more so,” his companion rejoined.

“I suppose it’s the French waiters,” said the first speaker. “Why don’t
they have French waiters in London?”

“Fancy a French waiter at a club,” said his friend.

The young Englishman started a little, as if he could not fancy it. “In
Paris I’m very apt to dine at a place where there’s an English waiter.
Don’t you know what’s-his-name’s, close to the thingumbob? They always
set an English waiter at me. I suppose they think I can’t speak French.”

“Well, you can’t.” And the elder of the young Englishmen unfolded his
napkin.

His companion took no notice whatever of this declaration. “I say,”
 he resumed in a moment, “I suppose we must learn to speak American. I
suppose we must take lessons.”

“I can’t understand them,” said the clever man.

“What the deuce is HE saying?” asked his comrade, appealing from the
French waiter.

“He is recommending some soft-shell crabs,” said the clever man.

And so, in desultory observation of the idiosyncrasies of the new
society in which they found themselves, the young Englishmen proceeded
to dine--going in largely, as the phrase is, for cooling draughts and
dishes, of which their attendant offered them a very long list. After
dinner they went out and slowly walked about the neighboring streets.
The early dusk of waning summer was coming on, but the heat was still
very great. The pavements were hot even to the stout boot soles of the
British travelers, and the trees along the curbstone emitted strange
exotic odors. The young men wandered through the adjoining square--that
queer place without palings, and with marble walks arranged in black
and white lozenges. There were a great many benches, crowded with
shabby-looking people, and the travelers remarked, very justly, that it
was not much like Belgrave Square. On one side was an enormous hotel,
lifting up into the hot darkness an immense array of open, brightly
lighted windows. At the base of this populous structure was an eternal
jangle of horsecars, and all round it, in the upper dusk, was a sinister
hum of mosquitoes. The ground floor of the hotel seemed to be a huge
transparent cage, flinging a wide glare of gaslight into the street,
of which it formed a sort of public adjunct, absorbing and emitting
the passersby promiscuously. The young Englishmen went in with everyone
else, from curiosity, and saw a couple of hundred men sitting on divans
along a great marble-paved corridor, with their legs stretched out,
together with several dozen more standing in a queue, as at the ticket
office of a railway station, before a brilliantly illuminated counter
of vast extent. These latter persons, who carried portmanteaus in their
hands, had a dejected, exhausted look; their garments were not very
fresh, and they seemed to be rendering some mysterious tribute to a
magnificent young man with a waxed mustache, and a shirtfront adorned
with diamond buttons, who every now and then dropped an absent glance
over their multitudinous patience. They were American citizens doing
homage to a hotel clerk.

“I’m glad he didn’t tell us to go there,” said one of our Englishmen,
alluding to their friend on the steamer, who had told them so many
things. They walked up the Fifth Avenue, where, for instance, he had
told them that all the first families lived. But the first families were
out of town, and our young travelers had only the satisfaction of seeing
some of the second--or perhaps even the third--taking the evening air
upon balconies and high flights of doorsteps, in the streets which
radiate from the more ornamental thoroughfare. They went a little way
down one of these side streets, and they saw young ladies in white
dresses--charming-looking persons--seated in graceful attitudes on the
chocolate-colored steps. In one or two places these young ladies were
conversing across the street with other young ladies seated in similar
postures and costumes in front of the opposite houses, and in the warm
night air their colloquial tones sounded strange in the ears of
the young Englishmen. One of our friends, nevertheless--the younger
one--intimated that he felt a disposition to interrupt a few of these
soft familiarities; but his companion observed, pertinently enough, that
he had better be careful. “We must not begin with making mistakes,” said
his companion.

“But he told us, you know--he told us,” urged the young man, alluding
again to the friend on the steamer.

“Never mind what he told us!” answered his comrade, who, if he had
greater talents, was also apparently more of a moralist.

By bedtime--in their impatience to taste of a terrestrial couch again
our seafarers went to bed early--it was still insufferably hot, and
the buzz of the mosquitoes at the open windows might have passed for an
audible crepitation of the temperature. “We can’t stand this, you know,”
 the young Englishmen said to each other; and they tossed about all night
more boisterously than they had tossed upon the Atlantic billows. On the
morrow, their first thought was that they would re-embark that day for
England; and then it occured to them that they might find an asylum
nearer at hand. The cave of Aeolus became their ideal of comfort, and
they wondered where the Americans went when they wished to cool
off. They had not the least idea, and they determined to apply for
information to Mr. J. L. Westgate. This was the name inscribed in a bold
hand on the back of a letter carefully preserved in the pocketbook of
our junior traveler. Beneath the address, in the left-hand corner of the
envelope, were the words, “Introducing Lord Lambeth and Percy Beaumont,
Esq.” The letter had been given to the two Englishmen by a good friend
of theirs in London, who had been in America two years previously, and
had singled out Mr. J. L. Westgate from the many friends he had left
there as the consignee, as it were, of his compatriots. “He is a capital
fellow,” the Englishman in London had said, “and he has got an awfully
pretty wife. He’s tremendously hospitable--he will do everything in the
world for you; and as he knows everyone over there, it is quite needless
I should give you any other introduction. He will make you see everyone;
trust to him for putting you into circulation. He has got a tremendously
pretty wife.” It was natural that in the hour of tribulation Lord
Lambeth and Mr. Percy Beaumont should have bethought themselves of a
gentleman whose attractions had been thus vividly depicted; all the more
so that he lived in the Fifth Avenue, and that the Fifth Avenue, as they
had ascertained the night before, was contiguous to their hotel. “Ten
to one he’ll be out of town,” said Percy Beaumont; “but we can at least
find out where he has gone, and we can immediately start in pursuit. He
can’t possibly have gone to a hotter place, you know.”

“Oh, there’s only one hotter place,” said Lord Lambeth, “and I hope he
hasn’t gone there.”

They strolled along the shady side of the street to the number
indicated upon the precious letter. The house presented an imposing
chocolate-colored expanse, relieved by facings and window cornices of
florid sculpture, and by a couple of dusty rose trees which clambered
over the balconies and the portico. This last-mentioned feature was
approached by a monumental flight of steps.

“Rather better than a London house,” said Lord Lambeth, looking down
from this altitude, after they had rung the bell.

“It depends upon what London house you mean,” replied his companion.
“You have a tremendous chance to get wet between the house door and your
carriage.”

“Well,” said Lord Lambeth, glancing at the burning heavens, “I ‘guess’
it doesn’t rain so much here!”

The door was opened by a long Negro in a white jacket, who grinned
familiarly when Lord Lambeth asked for Mr. Westgate.

“He ain’t at home, sah; he’s downtown at his o’fice.”

“Oh, at his office?” said the visitors. “And when will he be at home?”

“Well, sah, when he goes out dis way in de mo’ning, he ain’t liable to
come home all day.”

This was discouraging; but the address of Mr. Westgate’s office was
freely imparted by the intelligent black and was taken down by Percy
Beaumont in his pocketbook. The two gentlemen then returned, languidly,
to their hotel, and sent for a hackney coach, and in this commodious
vehicle they rolled comfortably downtown. They measured the whole length
of Broadway again and found it a path of fire; and then, deflecting to
the left, they were deposited by their conductor before a fresh,
light, ornamental structure, ten stories high, in a street crowded with
keen-faced, light-limbed young men, who were running about very quickly
and stopping each other eagerly at corners and in doorways. Passing into
this brilliant building, they were introduced by one of the keen-faced
young men--he was a charming fellow, in wonderful cream-colored garments
and a hat with a blue ribbon, who had evidently perceived them to be
aliens and helpless--to a very snug hydraulic elevator, in which they
took their place with many other persons, and which, shooting upward
in its vertical socket, presently projected them into the seventh
horizontal compartment of the edifice. Here, after brief delay, they
found themselves face to face with the friend of their friend in London.
His office was composed of several different rooms, and they waited very
silently in one of them after they had sent in their letter and their
cards. The letter was not one which it would take Mr. Westgate very long
to read, but he came out to speak to them more instantly than they could
have expected; he had evidently jumped up from his work. He was a tall,
lean personage and was dressed all in fresh white linen; he had a thin,
sharp, familiar face, with an expression that was at one and the same
time sociable and businesslike, a quick, intelligent eye, and a large
brown mustache, which concealed his mouth and made his chin, beneath it,
look small. Lord Lambeth thought he looked tremendously clever.

“How do you do, Lord Lambeth--how do you do, sir?” he said, holding the
open letter in his hand. “I’m very glad to see you; I hope you’re very
well. You had better come in here; I think it’s cooler,” and he led
the way into another room, where there were law books and papers, and
windows wide open beneath striped awning. Just opposite one of the
windows, on a line with his eyes, Lord Lambeth observed the weathervane
of a church steeple. The uproar of the street sounded infinitely far
below, and Lord Lambeth felt very high in the air. “I say it’s cooler,”
 pursued their host, “but everything is relative. How do you stand the
heat?”

“I can’t say we like it,” said Lord Lambeth; “but Beaumont likes it
better than I.”

“Well, it won’t last,” Mr. Westgate very cheerfully declared; “nothing
unpleasant lasts over here. It was very hot when Captain Littledale was
here; he did nothing but drink sherry cobblers. He expressed some doubt
in his letter whether I will remember him--as if I didn’t remember
making six sherry cobblers for him one day in about twenty minutes. I
hope you left him well, two years having elapsed since then.”

“Oh, yes, he’s all right,” said Lord Lambeth.

“I am always very glad to see your countrymen,” Mr. Westgate pursued. “I
thought it would be time some of you should be coming along. A friend
of mine was saying to me only a day or two ago, ‘It’s time for the
watermelons and the Englishmen.”

“The Englishmen and the watermelons just now are about the same thing,”
 Percy Beaumont observed, wiping his dripping forehead.

“Ah, well, we’ll put you on ice, as we do the melons. You must go down
to Newport.”

“We’ll go anywhere,” said Lord Lambeth.

“Yes, you want to go to Newport; that’s what you want to do,” Mr.
Westgate affirmed. “But let’s see--when did you get here?”

“Only yesterday,” said Percy Beaumont.

“Ah, yes, by the Russia. Where are you staying?”

“At the Hanover, I think they call it.”

“Pretty comfortable?” inquired Mr. Westgate.

“It seems a capital place, but I can’t say we like the gnats,” said Lord
Lambeth.

Mr. Westgate stared and laughed. “Oh, no, of course you don’t like the
gnats. We shall expect you to like a good many things over here, but we
shan’t insist upon your liking the gnats; though certainly you’ll admit
that, as gnats, they are fine, eh? But you oughtn’t to remain in the
city.”

“So we think,” said Lord Lambeth. “If you would kindly suggest
something--”

“Suggest something, my dear sir?” and Mr. Westgate looked at him,
narrowing his eyelids. “Open your mouth and shut your eyes! Leave it to
me, and I’ll put you through. It’s a matter of national pride with
me that all Englishmen should have a good time; and as I have had
considerable practice, I have learned to minister to their wants. I
find they generally want the right thing. So just please to consider
yourselves my property; and if anyone should try to appropriate you,
please to say, ‘Hands off; too late for the market.’ But let’s see,”
 continued the American, in his slow, humorous voice, with a distinctness
of utterance which appeared to his visitors to be part of a humorous
intention--a strangely leisurely, speculative voice for a man evidently
so busy and, as they felt, so professional--“let’s see; are you going to
make something of a stay, Lord Lambeth?”

“Oh, dear, no,” said the young Englishman; “my cousin was coming over
on some business, so I just came across, at an hour’s notice, for the
lark.”

“Is it your first visit to the United States?”

“Oh, dear, yes.”

“I was obliged to come on some business,” said Percy Beaumont, “and I
brought Lambeth along.”

“And YOU have been here before, sir?”

“Never--never.”

“I thought, from your referring to business--” said Mr. Westgate.

“Oh, you see I’m by way of being a barrister,” Percy Beaumont answered.
“I know some people that think of bringing a suit against one of your
railways, and they asked me to come over and take measures accordingly.”

“What’s your railroad?” he asked.

“The Tennessee Central.”

The American tilted back his chair a little and poised it an instant.
“Well, I’m sorry you want to attack one of our institutions,” he said,
smiling. “But I guess you had better enjoy yourself FIRST!”

“I’m certainly rather afraid I can’t work in this weather,” the young
barrister confessed.

“Leave that to the natives,” said Mr. Westgate. “Leave the Tennessee
Central to me, Mr. Beaumont. Some day we’ll talk it over, and I guess I
can make it square. But I didn’t know you Englishmen ever did any work,
in the upper classes.”

“Oh, we do a lot of work; don’t we, Lambeth?” asked Percy Beaumont.

“I must certainly be at home by the 19th of September,” said the younger
Englishman, irrelevantly but gently.

“For the shooting, eh? or is it the hunting, or the fishing?” inquired
his entertainer.

“Oh, I must be in Scotland,” said Lord Lambeth, blushing a little.

“Well, then,” rejoined Mr. Westgate, “you had better amuse yourself
first, also. You must go down and see Mrs. Westgate.”

“We should be so happy, if you would kindly tell us the train,” said
Percy Beaumont.

“It isn’t a train--it’s a boat.”

“Oh, I see. And what is the name of--a--the--a--town?”

“It isn’t a town,” said Mr. Westgate, laughing. “It’s a--well, what
shall I call it? It’s a watering place. In short, it’s Newport. You’ll
see what it is. It’s cool; that’s the principal thing. You will greatly
oblige me by going down there and putting yourself into the hands of
Mrs. Westgate. It isn’t perhaps for me to say it, but you couldn’t be in
better hands. Also in those of her sister, who is staying with her. She
is very fond of Englishmen. She thinks there is nothing like them.”

“Mrs. Westgate or--a--her sister?” asked Percy Beaumont modestly, yet in
the tone of an inquiring traveler.

“Oh, I mean my wife,” said Mr. Westgate. “I don’t suppose my
sister-in-law knows much about them. She has always led a very quiet
life; she has lived in Boston.”

Percy Beaumont listened with interest. “That, I believe,” he said, “is
the most--a--intellectual town?”

“I believe it is very intellectual. I don’t go there much,” responded
his host.

“I say, we ought to go there,” said Lord Lambeth to his companion.

“Oh, Lord Lambeth, wait till the great heat is over,” Mr. Westgate
interposed. “Boston in this weather would be very trying; it’s not the
temperature for intellectual exertion. At Boston, you know, you have to
pass an examination at the city limits; and when you come away they give
you a kind of degree.”

Lord Lambeth stared, blushing a little; and Percy Beaumont stared a
little also--but only with his fine natural complexion--glancing aside
after a moment to see that his companion was not looking too credulous,
for he had heard a great deal of American humor. “I daresay it is very
jolly,” said the younger gentleman.

“I daresay it is,” said Mr. Westgate. “Only I must impress upon you that
at present--tomorrow morning, at an early hour--you will be expected at
Newport. We have a house there; half the people in New York go there for
the summer. I am not sure that at this very moment my wife can take you
in; she has got a lot of people staying with her; I don’t know who they
all are; only she may have no room. But you can begin with the hotel,
and meanwhile you can live at my house. In that way--simply sleeping
at the hotel--you will find it tolerable. For the rest, you must make
yourself at home at my place. You mustn’t be shy, you know; if you are
only here for a month that will be a great waste of time. Mrs. Westgate
won’t neglect you, and you had better not try to resist her. I know
something about that. I expect you’ll find some pretty girls on the
premises. I shall write to my wife by this afternoon’s mail, and
tomorrow morning she and Miss Alden will look out for you. Just walk
right in and make yourself comfortable. Your steamer leaves from this
part of the city, and I will immediately send out and get you a cabin.
Then, at half past four o’clock, just call for me here, and I will go
with you and put you on board. It’s a big boat; you might get lost. A
few days hence, at the end of the week, I will come down to Newport and
see how you are getting on.”

The two young Englishmen inaugurated the policy of not resisting Mrs.
Westgate by submitting, with great docility and thankfulness, to her
husband. He was evidently a very good fellow, and he made an impression
upon his visitors; his hospitality seemed to recommend itself
consciously--with a friendly wink, as it were--as if it hinted,
judicially, that you could not possibly make a better bargain. Lord
Lambeth and his cousin left their entertainer to his labors and returned
to their hotel, where they spent three or four hours in their respective
shower baths. Percy Beaumont had suggested that they ought to see
something of the town; but “Oh, damn the town!” his noble kinsman had
rejoined. They returned to Mr. Westgate’s office in a carriage, with
their luggage, very punctually; but it must be reluctantly recorded
that, this time, he kept them waiting so long that they felt themselves
missing the steamer, and were deterred only by an amiable modesty from
dispensing with his attendance and starting on a hasty scramble to the
wharf. But when at last he appeared, and the carriage plunged into the
purlieus of Broadway, they jolted and jostled to such good purpose that
they reached the huge white vessel while the bell for departure was
still ringing and the absorption of passengers still active. It was
indeed, as Mr. Westgate had said, a big boat, and his leadership in the
innumerable and interminable corridors and cabins, with which he seemed
perfectly acquainted, and of which anyone and everyone appeared to have
the entree, was very grateful to the slightly bewildered voyagers. He
showed them their stateroom--a spacious apartment, embellished with gas
lamps, mirrors en pied, and sculptured furniture--and then, long after
they had been intimately convinced that the steamer was in motion and
launched upon the unknown stream that they were about to navigate, he
bade them a sociable farewell.

“Well, goodbye, Lord Lambeth,” he said; “goodbye, Mr. Percy Beaumont. I
hope you’ll have a good time. Just let them do what they want with you.
I’ll come down by-and-by and look after you.”

The young Englishmen emerged from their cabin and amused themselves with
wandering about the immense labyrinthine steamer, which struck them as
an extraordinary mixture of a ship and a hotel. It was densely crowded
with passengers, the larger number of whom appeared to be ladies and
very young children; and in the big saloons, ornamented in white and
gold, which followed each other in surprising succession, beneath the
swinging gaslight, and among the small side passages where the Negro
domestics of both sexes assembled with an air of philosophic leisure,
everyone was moving to and fro and exchanging loud and familiar
observations. Eventually, at the instance of a discriminating black, our
young men went and had some “supper” in a wonderful place arranged like
a theater, where, in a gilded gallery, upon which little boxes appeared
to open, a large orchestra was playing operatic selections, and, below,
people were handing about bills of fare, as if they had been programs.
All this was sufficiently curious; but the agreeable thing, later, was
to sit out on one of the great white decks of the steamer, in the warm
breezy darkness, and, in the vague starlight, to make out the line of
low, mysterious coast. The young Englishmen tried American cigars--those
of Mr. Westgate--and talked together as they usually talked, with many
odd silences, lapses of logic, and incongruities of transition; like
people who have grown old together and learned to supply each other’s
missing phrases; or, more especially, like people thoroughly conscious
of a common point of view, so that a style of conversation superficially
lacking in finish might suffice for reference to a fund of associations
in the light of which everything was all right.

“We really seem to be going out to sea,” Percy Beaumont observed. “Upon
my word, we are going back to England. He has shipped us off again. I
call that ‘real mean.’”

“I suppose it’s all right,” said Lord Lambeth. “I want to see those
pretty girls at Newport. You know, he told us the place was an island;
and aren’t all islands in the sea?”

“Well,” resumed the elder traveler after a while, “if his house is as
good as his cigars, we shall do very well.”

“He seems a very good fellow,” said Lord Lambeth, as if this idea had
just occurred to him.

“I say, we had better remain at the inn,” rejoined his companion
presently. “I don’t think I like the way he spoke of his house. I don’t
like stopping in the house with such a tremendous lot of women.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” said Lord Lambeth. And then they smoked a while in
silence. “Fancy his thinking we do no work in England!” the young man
resumed.

“I daresay he didn’t really think so,” said Percy Beaumont.

“Well, I guess they don’t know much about England over here!” declared
Lord Lambeth humorously. And then there was another long pause. “He was
devilish civil,” observed the young nobleman.

“Nothing, certainly, could have been more civil,” rejoined his
companion.

“Littledale said his wife was great fun,” said Lord Lambeth.

“Whose wife--Littledale’s?”

“This American’s--Mrs. Westgate. What’s his name? J.L.”

Beaumont was silent a moment. “What was fun to Littledale,” he said at
last, rather sententiously, “may be death to us.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked his kinsman. “I am as good a man as
Littledale.”

“My dear boy, I hope you won’t begin to flirt,” said Percy Beaumont.

“I don’t care. I daresay I shan’t begin.”

“With a married woman, if she’s bent upon it, it’s all very well,”
 Beaumont expounded. “But our friend mentioned a young lady--a sister, a
sister-in-law. For God’s sake, don’t get entangled with her!”

“How do you mean entangled?”

“Depend upon it she will try to hook you.”

“Oh, bother!” said Lord Lambeth.

“American girls are very clever,” urged his companion.

“So much the better,” the young man declared.

“I fancy they are always up to some game of that sort,” Beaumont
continued.

“They can’t be worse than they are in England,” said Lord Lambeth
judicially.

“Ah, but in England,” replied Beaumont, “you have got your natural
protectors. You have got your mother and sisters.”

“My mother and sisters--” began the young nobleman with a certain
energy. But he stopped in time, puffing at his cigar.

“Your mother spoke to me about it, with tears in her eyes,” said Percy
Beaumont. “She said she felt very nervous. I promised to keep you out of
mischief.”

“You had better take care of yourself,” said the object of maternal and
ducal solicitude.

“Ah,” rejoined the young barrister, “I haven’t the expectation of a
hundred thousand a year, not to mention other attractions.”

“Well,” said Lord Lambeth, “don’t cry out before you’re hurt!”

It was certainly very much cooler at Newport, where our travelers found
themselves assigned to a couple of diminutive bedrooms in a faraway
angle of an immense hotel. They had gone ashore in the early summer
twilight and had very promptly put themselves to bed; thanks to which
circumstance and to their having, during the previous hours, in their
commodious cabin, slept the sleep of youth and health, they began to
feel, toward eleven o’clock, very alert and inquisitive. They looked out
of their windows across a row of small green fields, bordered with
low stone walls of rude construction, and saw a deep blue ocean lying
beneath a deep blue sky, and flecked now and then with scintillating
patches of foam. A strong, fresh breeze came in through the curtainless
casements and prompted our young men to observe, generally, that it
didn’t seem half a bad climate. They made other observations after they
had emerged from their rooms in pursuit of breakfast--a meal of which
they partook in a huge bare hall, where a hundred Negroes, in white
jackets, were shuffling about upon an uncarpeted floor; where the
flies were superabundant, and the tables and dishes covered over with a
strange, voluminous integument of coarse blue gauze; and where several
little boys and girls, who had risen late, were seated in fastidious
solitude at the morning repast. These young persons had not the morning
paper before them, but they were engaged in languid perusal of the bill
of fare.

This latter document was a great puzzle to our friends, who, on
reflecting that its bewildering categories had relation to breakfast
alone, had an uneasy prevision of an encyclopedic dinner list. They
found a great deal of entertainment at the hotel, an enormous wooden
structure, for the erection of which it seemed to them that the
virgin forests of the West must have been terribly deflowered. It was
perforated from end to end with immense bare corridors, through which a
strong draught was blowing--bearing along wonderful figures of ladies
in white morning dresses and clouds of Valenciennes lace, who seemed
to float down the long vistas with expanded furbelows, like angels
spreading their wings. In front was a gigantic veranda, upon which an
army might have encamped--a vast wooden terrace, with a roof as lofty
as the nave of a cathedral. Here our young Englishmen enjoyed, as they
supposed, a glimpse of American society, which was distributed over the
measureless expanse in a variety of sedentary attitudes, and appeared
to consist largely of pretty young girls, dressed as if for a fete
champetre, swaying to and fro in rocking chairs, fanning themselves with
large straw fans, and enjoying an enviable exemption from social cares.
Lord Lambeth had a theory, which it might be interesting to trace to
its origin, that it would be not only agreeable, but easily possible, to
enter into relations with one of these young ladies; and his companion
(as he had done a couple of days before) found occasion to check the
young nobleman’s colloquial impulses.

“You had better take care,” said Percy Beaumont, “or you will have an
offended father or brother pulling out a bowie knife.”

“I assure you it is all right,” Lord Lambeth replied. “You know the
Americans come to these big hotels to make acquaintances.”

“I know nothing about it, and neither do you,” said his kinsman,
who, like a clever man, had begun to perceive that the observation of
American society demanded a readjustment of one’s standard.

“Hang it, then let’s find out!” cried Lord Lambeth with some impatience.
“You know I don’t want to miss anything.”

“We will find out,” said Percy Beaumont very reasonably. “We will go and
see Mrs. Westgate and make all proper inquiries.”

And so the two inquiring Englishmen, who had this lady’s address
inscribed in her husband’s hand upon a card, descended from the veranda
of the big hotel and took their way, according to direction, along a
large straight road, past a series of fresh-looking villas embosomed
in shrubs and flowers and enclosed in an ingenious variety of wooden
palings. The morning was brilliant and cool, the villas were smart
and snug, and the walk of the young travelers was very entertaining.
Everything looked as if it had received a coat of fresh paint the day
before--the red roofs, the green shutters, the clean, bright browns and
buffs of the housefronts. The flower beds on the little lawns seemed to
sparkle in the radiant air, and the gravel in the short carriage sweeps
to flash and twinkle. Along the road came a hundred little
basket phaetons, in which, almost always, a couple of ladies were
sitting--ladies in white dresses and long white gloves, holding the
reins and looking at the two Englishmen, whose nationality was not
elusive, through thick blue veils tied tightly about their faces as if
to guard their complexions. At last the young men came within sight of
the sea again, and then, having interrogated a gardener over the paling
of a villa, they turned into an open gate. Here they found themselves
face to face with the ocean and with a very picturesque structure,
resembling a magnified chalet, which was perched upon a green embankment
just above it. The house had a veranda of extraordinary width all around
it and a great many doors and windows standing open to the veranda.
These various apertures had, in common, such an accessible, hospitable
air, such a breezy flutter within of light curtains, such expansive
thresholds and reassuring interiors, that our friends hardly knew which
was the regular entrance, and, after hesitating a moment, presented
themselves at one of the windows. The room within was dark, but in
a moment a graceful figure vaguely shaped itself in the rich-looking
gloom, and a lady came to meet them. Then they saw that she had been
seated at a table writing, and that she had heard them and had got up.
She stepped out into the light; she wore a frank, charming smile, with
which she held out her hand to Percy Beaumont.

“Oh, you must be Lord Lambeth and Mr. Beaumont,” she said. “I have heard
from my husband that you would come. I am extremely glad to see you.”
 And she shook hands with each of her visitors. Her visitors were a
little shy, but they had very good manners; they responded with smiles
and exclamations, and they apologized for not knowing the front door.
The lady rejoined, with vivacity, that when she wanted to see people
very much she did not insist upon those distinctions, and that Mr.
Westgate had written to her of his English friends in terms that made
her really anxious. “He said you were so terribly prostrated,” said Mrs.
Westgate.

“Oh, you mean by the heat?” replied Percy Beaumont. “We were
rather knocked up, but we feel wonderfully better. We had such a
jolly--a--voyage down here. It’s so very good of you to mind.”

“Yes, it’s so very kind of you,” murmured Lord Lambeth.

Mrs. Westgate stood smiling; she was extremely pretty. “Well, I did
mind,” she said; “and I thought of sending for you this morning to the
Ocean House. I am very glad you are better, and I am charmed you have
arrived. You must come round to the other side of the piazza.” And she
led the way, with a light, smooth step, looking back at the young men
and smiling.

The other side of the piazza was, as Lord Lambeth presently remarked, a
very jolly place. It was of the most liberal proportions, and with its
awnings, its fanciful chairs, its cushions and rugs, its view of the
ocean, close at hand, tumbling along the base of the low cliffs whose
level tops intervened in lawnlike smoothness, it formed a charming
complement to the drawing room. As such it was in course of use at the
present moment; it was occupied by a social circle. There were several
ladies and two or three gentlemen, to whom Mrs. Westgate proceeded to
introduce the distinguished strangers. She mentioned a great many names
very freely and distinctly; the young Englishmen, shuffling about and
bowing, were rather bewildered. But at last they were provided
with chairs--low, wicker chairs, gilded, and tied with a great many
ribbons--and one of the ladies (a very young person, with a little snub
nose and several dimples) offered Percy Beaumont a fan. The fan was also
adorned with pink love knots; but Percy Beaumont declined it, although
he was very hot. Presently, however, it became cooler; the breeze from
the sea was delicious, the view was charming, and the people sitting
there looked exceedingly fresh and comfortable. Several of the ladies
seemed to be young girls, and the gentlemen were slim, fair youths,
such as our friends had seen the day before in New York. The ladies were
working upon bands of tapestry, and one of the young men had an open
book in his lap. Beaumont afterward learned from one of the ladies that
this young man had been reading aloud, that he was from Boston and was
very fond of reading aloud. Beaumont said it was a great pity that they
had interrupted him; he should like so much (from all he had heard) to
hear a Bostonian read. Couldn’t the young man be induced to go on?

“Oh no,” said his informant very freely; “he wouldn’t be able to get the
young ladies to attend to him now.”

There was something very friendly, Beaumont perceived, in the attitude
of the company; they looked at the young Englishmen with an air of
animated sympathy and interest; they smiled, brightly and unanimously,
at everything either of the visitors said. Lord Lambeth and his
companion felt that they were being made very welcome. Mrs. Westgate
seated herself between them, and, talking a great deal to each, they had
occasion to observe that she was as pretty as their friend Littledale
had promised. She was thirty years old, with the eyes and the smile of
a girl of seventeen, and she was extremely light and graceful, elegant,
exquisite. Mrs. Westgate was extremely spontaneous. She was very
frank and demonstrative and appeared always--while she looked at
you delightedly with her beautiful young eyes--to be making sudden
confessions and concessions, after momentary hesitations.

“We shall expect to see a great deal of you,” she said to Lord Lambeth
with a kind of joyous earnestness. “We are very fond of Englishmen here;
that is, there are a great many we have been fond of. After a day or
two you must come and stay with us; we hope you will stay a long time.
Newport’s a very nice place when you come really to know it, when you
know plenty of people. Of course you and Mr. Beaumont will have no
difficulty about that. Englishmen are very well received here; there are
almost always two or three of them about. I think they always like it,
and I must say I should think they would. They receive ever so much
attention. I must say I think they sometimes get spoiled; but I am sure
you and Mr. Beaumont are proof against that. My husband tells me you
are a friend of Captain Littledale; he was such a charming man. He made
himself most agreeable here, and I am sure I wonder he didn’t stay.
It couldn’t have been pleasanter for him in his own country, though,
I suppose, it is very pleasant in England, for English people. I don’t
know myself; I have been there very little. I have been a great deal
abroad, but I am always on the Continent. I must say I’m extremely fond
of Paris; you know we Americans always are; we go there when we die. Did
you ever hear that before? That was said by a great wit, I mean the good
Americans; but we are all good; you’ll see that for yourself. All I know
of England is London, and all I know of London is that place on that
little corner, you know, where you buy jackets--jackets with that coarse
braid and those big buttons. They make very good jackets in London, I
will do you the justice to say that. And some people like the hats; but
about the hats I was always a heretic; I always got my hats in Paris.
You can’t wear an English hat--at least I never could--unless you dress
your hair a l’Anglaise; and I must say that is a talent I have never
possessed. In Paris they will make things to suit your peculiarities;
but in England I think you like much more to have--how shall I say
it?--one thing for everybody. I mean as regards dress. I don’t know
about other things; but I have always supposed that in other things
everything was different. I mean according to the people--according to
the classes, and all that. I am afraid you will think that I don’t take
a very favorable view; but you know you can’t take a very favorable view
in Dover Street in the month of November. That has always been my fate.
Do you know Jones’s Hotel in Dover Street? That’s all I know of England.
Of course everyone admits that the English hotels are your weak point.
There was always the most frightful fog; I couldn’t see to try my things
on. When I got over to America--into the light--I usually found they
were twice too big. The next time I mean to go in the season; I think
I shall go next year. I want very much to take my sister; she has never
been to England. I don’t know whether you know what I mean by saying
that the Englishmen who come here sometimes get spoiled. I mean that
they take things as a matter of course--things that are done for them.
Now, naturally, they are only a matter of course when the Englishmen are
very nice. But, of course, they are almost always very nice. Of course
this isn’t nearly such an interesting country as England; there are not
nearly so many things to see, and we haven’t your country life. I have
never seen anything of your country life; when I am in Europe I am
always on the Continent. But I have heard a great deal about it; I know
that when you are among yourselves in the country you have the most
beautiful time. Of course we have nothing of that sort, we have nothing
on that scale. I don’t apologize, Lord Lambeth; some Americans are
always apologizing; you must have noticed that. We have the reputation
of always boasting and bragging and waving the American flag; but I must
say that what strikes me is that we are perpetually making excuses and
trying to smooth things over. The American flag has quite gone out of
fashion; it’s very carefully folded up, like an old tablecloth. Why
should we apologize? The English never apologize--do they? No; I
must say I never apologize. You must take us as we come--with all our
imperfections on our heads. Of course we haven’t your country life, and
your old ruins, and your great estates, and your leisure class, and all
that. But if we haven’t, I should think you might find it a pleasant
change--I think any country is pleasant where they have pleasant
manners. Captain Littledale told me he had never seen such pleasant
manners as at Newport, and he had been a great deal in European society.
Hadn’t he been in the diplomatic service? He told me the dream of his
life was to get appointed to a diplomatic post in Washington. But he
doesn’t seem to have succeeded. I suppose that in England promotion--and
all that sort of thing--is fearfully slow. With us, you know, it’s a
great deal too fast. You see, I admit our drawbacks. But I must confess
I think Newport is an ideal place. I don’t know anything like it
anywhere. Captain Littledale told me he didn’t know anything like it
anywhere. It’s entirely different from most watering places; it’s a
most charming life. I must say I think that when one goes to a foreign
country one ought to enjoy the differences. Of course there are
differences, otherwise what did one come abroad for? Look for your
pleasure in the differences, Lord Lambeth; that’s the way to do it;
and then I am sure you will find American society--at least Newport
society--most charming and most interesting. I wish very much my husband
were here; but he’s dreadfully confined to New York. I suppose you
think that is very strange--for a gentleman. But you see we haven’t any
leisure class.”

Mrs. Westgate’s discourse, delivered in a soft, sweet voice, flowed
on like a miniature torrent, and was interrupted by a hundred
little smiles, glances, and gestures, which might have figured the
irregularities and obstructions of such a stream. Lord Lambeth listened
to her with, it must be confessed, a rather ineffectual attention,
although he indulged in a good many little murmurs and ejaculations
of assent and deprecation. He had no great faculty for apprehending
generalizations. There were some three or four indeed which, in the
play of his own intelligence, he had originated, and which had seemed
convenient at the moment; but at the present time he could hardly have
been said to follow Mrs. Westgate as she darted gracefully about in the
sea of speculation. Fortunately she asked for no especial rejoinder, for
she looked about at the rest of the company as well, and smiled at Percy
Beaumont, on the other side of her, as if he too much understand her and
agree with her. He was rather more successful than his companion; for
besides being, as we know, cleverer, his attention was not vaguely
distracted by close vicinity to a remarkably interesting young girl,
with dark hair and blue eyes. This was the case with Lord Lambeth, to
whom it occurred after a while that the young girl with blue eyes and
dark hair was the pretty sister of whom Mrs. Westgate had spoken. She
presently turned to him with a remark which established her identity.

“It’s a great pity you couldn’t have brought my brother-in-law with you.
It’s a great shame he should be in New York in these days.”

“Oh, yes; it’s so very hot,” said Lord Lambeth.

“It must be dreadful,” said the young girl.

“I daresay he is very busy,” Lord Lambeth observed.

“The gentlemen in America work too much,” the young girl went on.

“Oh, do they? I daresay they like it,” said her interlocutor.

“I don’t like it. One never sees them.”

“Don’t you, really?” asked Lord Lambeth. “I shouldn’t have fancied
that.”

“Have you come to study American manners?” asked the young girl.

“Oh, I don’t know. I just came over for a lark. I haven’t got long.”
 Here there was a pause, and Lord Lambeth began again. “But Mr. Westgate
will come down here, will not he?”

“I certainly hope he will. He must help to entertain you and Mr.
Beaumont.”

Lord Lambeth looked at her a little with his handsome brown eyes. “Do
you suppose he would have come down with us if we had urged him?”

Mr. Westgate’s sister-in-law was silent a moment, and then, “I daresay
he would,” she answered.

“Really!” said the young Englishman. “He was immensely civil to Beaumont
and me,” he added.

“He is a dear good fellow,” the young lady rejoined, “and he is a
perfect husband. But all Americans are that,” she continued, smiling.

“Really!” Lord Lambeth exclaimed again and wondered whether all American
ladies had such a passion for generalizing as these two.

He sat there a good while: there was a great deal of talk; it was all
very friendly and lively and jolly. Everyone present, sooner or
later, said something to him, and seemed to make a particular point of
addressing him by name. Two or three other persons came in, and there
was a shifting of seats and changing of places; the gentlemen all
entered into intimate conversation with the two Englishmen, made them
urgent offers of hospitality, and hoped they might frequently be of
service to them. They were afraid Lord Lambeth and Mr. Beaumont were not
very comfortable at their hotel; that it was not, as one of them said,
“so private as those dear little English inns of yours.” This last
gentleman went on to say that unfortunately, as yet, perhaps, privacy
was not quite so easily obtained in America as might be desired; still,
he continued, you could generally get it by paying for it; in fact, you
could get everything in America nowadays by paying for it. American life
was certainly growing a great deal more private; it was growing very
much like England. Everything at Newport, for instance, was thoroughly
private; Lord Lambeth would probably be struck with that. It was also
represented to the strangers that it mattered very little whether their
hotel was agreeable, as everyone would want them to make visits; they
would stay with other people, and, in any case, they would be a great
deal at Mrs. Westgate’s. They would find that very charming; it was
the pleasantest house in Newport. It was a pity Mr. Westgate was always
away; he was a man of the highest ability--very acute, very acute. He
worked like a horse, and he left his wife--well, to do about as she
liked. He liked her to enjoy herself, and she seemed to know how. She
was extremely brilliant and a splendid talker. Some people preferred her
sister; but Miss Alden was very different; she was in a different style
altogether. Some people even thought her prettier, and, certainly, she
was not so sharp. She was more in the Boston style; she had lived a
great deal in Boston, and she was very highly educated. Boston girls, it
was propounded, were more like English young ladies.

Lord Lambeth had presently a chance to test the truth of this
proposition, for on the company rising in compliance with a suggestion
from their hostess that they should walk down to the rocks and look
at the sea, the young Englishman again found himself, as they strolled
across the grass, in proximity to Mrs. Westgate’s sister. Though she was
but a girl of twenty, she appeared to feel the obligation to exert an
active hospitality; and this was, perhaps, the more to be noticed as she
seemed by nature a reserved and retiring person, and had little of her
sister’s fraternizing quality. She was perhaps rather too thin, and she
was a little pale; but as she moved slowly over the grass, with her arms
hanging at her sides, looking gravely for a moment at the sea and then
brightly, for all her gravity, at him, Lord Lambeth thought her at least
as pretty as Mrs. Westgate, and reflected that if this was the Boston
style the Boston style was very charming. He thought she looked very
clever; he could imagine that she was highly educated; but at the same
time she seemed gentle and graceful. For all her cleverness, however,
he felt that she had to think a little what to say; she didn’t say the
first thing that came into her head; he had come from a different part
of the world and from a different society, and she was trying to adapt
her conversation. The others were scattering themselves near the rocks;
Mrs. Westgate had charge of Percy Beaumont.

“Very jolly place, isn’t it?” said Lord Lambeth. “It’s a very jolly
place to sit.”

“Very charming,” said the young girl. “I often sit here; there are all
kinds of cozy corners--as if they had been made on purpose.”

“Ah! I suppose you have had some of them made,” said the young man.

Miss Alden looked at him a moment. “Oh no, we have had nothing made.
It’s pure nature.”

“I should think you would have a few little benches--rustic seats and
that sort of thing. It might be so jolly to sit here, you know,” Lord
Lambeth went on.

“I am afraid we haven’t so many of those things as you,” said the young
girl thoughtfully.

“I daresay you go in for pure nature, as you were saying. Nature over
here must be so grand, you know.” And Lord Lambeth looked about him.

The little coast line hereabouts was very pretty, but it was not at all
grand, and Miss Alden appeared to rise to a perception of this fact.
“I am afraid it seems to you very rough,” she said. “It’s not like the
coast scenery in Kingsley’s novels.”

“Ah, the novels always overdo it, you know,” Lord Lambeth rejoined. “You
must not go by the novels.”

They were wandering about a little on the rocks, and they stopped and
looked down into a narrow chasm where the rising tide made a curious
bellowing sound. It was loud enough to prevent their hearing each other,
and they stood there for some moments in silence. The young girl looked
at her companion, observing him attentively, but covertly, as women,
even when very young, know how to do. Lord Lambeth repaid observation;
tall, straight, and strong, he was handsome as certain young Englishmen,
and certain young Englishmen almost alone, are handsome; with a perfect
finish of feature and a look of intellectual repose and gentle good
temper which seemed somehow to be consequent upon his well-cut nose and
chin. And to speak of Lord Lambeth’s expression of intellectual repose
is not simply a civil way of saying that he looked stupid. He was
evidently not a young man of an irritable imagination; he was not, as
he would himself have said, tremendously clever; but though there was a
kind of appealing dullness in his eye, he looked thoroughly reasonable
and competent, and his appearance proclaimed that to be a nobleman,
an athlete, and an excellent fellow was a sufficiently brilliant
combination of qualities. The young girl beside him, it may be attested
without further delay, thought him the handsomest young man she had ever
seen; and Bessie Alden’s imagination, unlike that of her companion,
was irritable. He, however, was also making up his mind that she was
uncommonly pretty.

“I daresay it’s very gay here, that you have lots of balls and parties,”
 he said; for, if he was not tremendously clever, he rather prided
himself on having, with women, a sufficiency of conversation.

“Oh, yes, there is a great deal going on,” Bessie Alden replied. “There
are not so many balls, but there are a good many other things. You will
see for yourself; we live rather in the midst of it.”

“It’s very kind of you to say that. But I thought you Americans were
always dancing.”

“I suppose we dance a good deal; but I have never seen much of it. We
don’t do it much, at any rate, in summer. And I am sure,” said Bessie
Alden, “that we don’t have so many balls as you have in England.”

“Really!” exclaimed Lord Lambeth. “Ah, in England it all depends, you
know.”

“You will not think much of our gaieties,” said the young girl, looking
at him with a little mixture of interrogation and decision which was
peculiar to her. The interrogation seemed earnest and the decision
seemed arch; but the mixture, at any rate, was charming. “Those things,
with us, are much less splendid than in England.”

“I fancy you don’t mean that,” said Lord Lambeth, laughing.

“I assure you I mean everything I say,” the young girl declared.
“Certainly, from what I have read about English society, it is very
different.”

“Ah well, you know,” said her companion, “those things are often
described by fellows who know nothing about them. You mustn’t mind what
you read.”

“Oh, I SHALL mind what I read!” Bessie Alden rejoined. “When I read
Thackeray and George Eliot, how can I help minding them?”

“Ah well, Thackeray, and George Eliot,” said the young nobleman; “I
haven’t read much of them.”

“Don’t you suppose they know about society?” asked Bessie Alden.

“Oh, I daresay they know; they were so very clever. But these
fashionable novels,” said Lord Lambeth, “they are awful rot, you know.”

His companion looked at him a moment with her dark blue eyes, and then
she looked down in the chasm where the water was tumbling about. “Do you
mean Mrs. Gore, for instance?” she said presently, raising her eyes.

“I am afraid I haven’t read that, either,” was the young man’s
rejoinder, laughing a little and blushing. “I am afraid you’ll think I
am not very intellectual.”

“Reading Mrs. Gore is no proof of intellect. But I like reading
everything about English life--even poor books. I am so curious about
it.”

“Aren’t ladies always curious?” asked the young man jestingly.

But Bessie Alden appeared to desire to answer his question seriously. “I
don’t think so--I don’t think we are enough so--that we care about many
things. So it’s all the more of a compliment,” she added, “that I should
want to know so much about England.”

The logic here seemed a little close; but Lord Lambeth, made conscious
of a compliment, found his natural modesty just at hand. “I am sure you
know a great deal more than I do.”

“I really think I know a great deal--for a person who has never been
there.”

“Have you really never been there?” cried Lord Lambeth. “Fancy!”

“Never--except in imagination,” said the young girl.

“Fancy!” repeated her companion. “But I daresay you’ll go soon, won’t
you?”

“It’s the dream of my life!” declared Bessie Alden, smiling.

“But your sister seems to know a tremendous lot about London,” Lord
Lambeth went on.

The young girl was silent a moment. “My sister and I are two very
different persons,” she presently said. “She has been a great deal in
Europe. She has been in England several times. She has known a great
many English people.”

“But you must have known some, too,” said Lord Lambeth.

“I don’t think that I have ever spoken to one before. You are the first
Englishman that--to my knowledge--I have ever talked with.”

Bessie Alden made this statement with a certain gravity--almost, as it
seemed to Lord Lambeth, an impressiveness. Attempts at impressiveness
always made him feel awkward, and he now began to laugh and swing his
stick. “Ah, you would have been sure to know!” he said. And then he
added, after an instant, “I’m sorry I am not a better specimen.”

The young girl looked away; but she smiled, laying aside her
impressiveness. “You must remember that you are only a beginning,” she
said. Then she retraced her steps, leading the way back to the lawn,
where they saw Mrs. Westgate come toward them with Percy Beaumont still
at her side. “Perhaps I shall go to England next year,” Miss Alden
continued; “I want to, immensely. My sister is going to Europe, and she
has asked me to go with her. If we go, I shall make her stay as long as
possible in London.”

“Ah, you must come in July,” said Lord Lambeth. “That’s the time when
there is most going on.”

“I don’t think I can wait till July,” the young girl rejoined. “By the
first of May I shall be very impatient.” They had gone further, and Mrs.
Westgate and her companion were near them. “Kitty,” said Miss Alden,
“I have given out that we are going to London next May. So please to
conduct yourself accordingly.”

Percy Beaumont wore a somewhat animated--even a slightly irritated--air.
He was by no means so handsome a man as his cousin, although in his
cousin’s absence he might have passed for a striking specimen of the
tall, muscular, fair-bearded, clear-eyed Englishman. Just now Beaumont’s
clear eyes, which were small and of a pale gray color, had a rather
troubled light, and, after glancing at Bessie Alden while she spoke,
he rested them upon his kinsman. Mrs. Westgate meanwhile, with her
superfluously pretty gaze, looked at everyone alike.

“You had better wait till the time comes,” she said to her sister.
“Perhaps next May you won’t care so much about London. Mr. Beaumont
and I,” she went on, smiling at her companion, “have had a tremendous
discussion. We don’t agree about anything. It’s perfectly delightful.”

“Oh, I say, Percy!” exclaimed Lord Lambeth.

“I disagree,” said Beaumont, stroking down his back hair, “even to the
point of not thinking it delightful.”

“Oh, I say!” cried Lord Lambeth again.

“I don’t see anything delightful in my disagreeing with Mrs. Westgate,”
 said Percy Beaumont.

“Well, I do!” Mrs. Westgate declared; and she turned to her sister. “You
know you have to go to town. The phaeton is there. You had better take
Lord Lambeth.”

At this point Percy Beaumont certainly looked straight at his kinsman;
he tried to catch his eye. But Lord Lambeth would not look at him; his
own eyes were better occupied. “I shall be very happy,” cried Bessie
Alden. “I am only going to some shops. But I will drive you about and
show you the place.”

“An American woman who respects herself,” said Mrs. Westgate, turning to
Beaumont with her bright expository air, “must buy something every day
of her life. If she can not do it herself, she must send out some
member of her family for the purpose. So Bessie goes forth to fulfill my
mission.”

The young girl had walked away, with Lord Lambeth by her side, to whom
she was talking still; and Percy Beaumont watched them as they passed
toward the house. “She fulfills her own mission,” he presently said;
“that of being a very attractive young lady.”

“I don’t know that I should say very attractive,” Mrs. Westgate
rejoined. “She is not so much that as she is charming when you really
know her. She is very shy.”

“Oh, indeed!” said Percy Beaumont.

“Extremely shy,” Mrs. Westgate repeated. “But she is a dear good girl;
she is a charming species of girl. She is not in the least a flirt; that
isn’t at all her line; she doesn’t know the alphabet of that sort of
thing. She is very simple, very serious. She has lived a great deal in
Boston, with another sister of mine--the eldest of us--who married a
Bostonian. She is very cultivated, not at all like me; I am not in the
least cultivated. She has studied immensely and read everything; she is
what they call in Boston ‘thoughtful.’”

“A rum sort of girl for Lambeth to get hold of!” his lordship’s kinsman
privately reflected.

“I really believe,” Mrs. Westgate continued, “that the most charming
girl in the world is a Boston superstructure upon a New York fonds; or
perhaps a New York superstructure upon a Boston fonds. At any rate, it’s
the mixture,” said Mrs. Westgate, who continued to give Percy Beaumont a
great deal of information.

Lord Lambeth got into a little basket phaeton with Bessie Alden, and she
drove him down the long avenue, whose extent he had measured on foot a
couple of hours before, into the ancient town, as it was called in that
part of the world, of Newport. The ancient town was a curious affair--a
collection of fresh-looking little wooden houses, painted white,
scattered over a hillside and clustered about a long straight street
paved with enormous cobblestones. There were plenty of shops--a large
proportion of which appeared to be those of fruit vendors, with piles
of huge watermelons and pumpkins stacked in front of them; and, drawn up
before the shops, or bumping about on the cobblestones, were innumerable
other basket phaetons freighted with ladies of high fashion, who greeted
each other from vehicle to vehicle and conversed on the edge of the
pavement in a manner that struck Lord Lambeth as demonstrative, with a
great many “Oh, my dears,” and little quick exclamations and caresses.
His companion went into seventeen shops--he amused himself with counting
them--and accumulated at the bottom of the phaeton a pile of bundles
that hardly left the young Englishman a place for his feet. As she had
no groom nor footman, he sat in the phaeton to hold the ponies, where,
although he was not a particularly acute observer, he saw much to
entertain him--especially the ladies just mentioned, who wandered up
and down with the appearance of a kind of aimless intentness, as if they
were looking for something to buy, and who, tripping in and out of
their vehicles, displayed remarkably pretty feet. It all seemed to Lord
Lambeth very odd, and bright, and gay. Of course, before they got back
to the villa, he had had a great deal of desultory conversation with
Bessie Alden.

The young Englishmen spent the whole of that day and the whole of
many successive days in what the French call the intimite of their new
friends. They agreed that it was extremely jolly, that they had never
known anything more agreeable. It is not proposed to narrate minutely
the incidents of their sojourn on this charming shore; though if it
were convenient I might present a record of impressions nonetheless
delectable that they were not exhaustively analyzed. Many of them still
linger in the minds of our travelers, attended by a train of harmonious
images--images of brilliant mornings on lawns and piazzas that
overlooked the sea; of innumerable pretty girls; of infinite lounging
and talking and laughing and flirting and lunching and dining; of
universal friendliness and frankness; of occasions on which they knew
everyone and everything and had an extraordinary sense of ease; of
drives and rides in the late afternoon over gleaming beaches, on long
sea roads, beneath a sky lighted up by marvelous sunsets; of suppers, on
the return, informal, irregular, agreeable; of evenings at open windows
or on the perpetual verandas, in the summer starlight, above the warm
Atlantic. The young Englishmen were introduced to everybody, entertained
by everybody, intimate with everybody. At the end of three days they
had removed their luggage from the hotel and had gone to stay with
Mrs. Westgate--a step to which Percy Beaumont at first offered some
conscientious opposition. I call his opposition conscientious, because
it was founded upon some talk that he had had, on the second day, with
Bessie Alden. He had indeed had a good deal of talk with her, for she
was not literally always in conversation with Lord Lambeth. He had
meditated upon Mrs. Westgate’s account of her sister, and he discovered
for himself that the young lady was clever, and appeared to have read a
great deal. She seemed very nice, though he could not make out, as Mrs.
Westgate had said, she was shy. If she was shy, she carried it off very
well.

“Mr. Beaumont,” she had said, “please tell me something about Lord
Lambeth’s family. How would you say it in England--his position?”

“His position?” Percy Beaumont repeated.

“His rank, or whatever you call it. Unfortunately we haven’t got a
PEERAGE, like the people in Thackeray.”

“That’s a great pity,” said Beaumont. “You would find it all set forth
there so much better than I can do it.”

“He is a peer, then?”

“Oh, yes, he is a peer.”

“And has he any other title than Lord Lambeth?”

“His title is the Marquis of Lambeth,” said Beaumont; and then he was
silent. Bessie Alden appeared to be looking at him with interest. “He is
the son of the Duke of Bayswater,” he added presently.

“The eldest son?”

“The only son.”

“And are his parents living?”

“Oh yes; if his father were not living he would be a duke.”

“So that when his father dies,” pursued Bessie Alden with more
simplicity than might have been expected in a clever girl, “he will
become Duke of Bayswater?”

“Of course,” said Percy Beaumont. “But his father is in excellent
health.”

“And his mother?”

Beaumont smiled a little. “The duchess is uncommonly robust.”

“And has he any sisters?”

“Yes, there are two.”

“And what are they called?”

“One of them is married. She is the Countess of Pimlico.”

“And the other?”

“The other is unmarried; she is plain Lady Julia.”

Bessie Alden looked at him a moment. “Is she very plain?”

Beaumont began to laugh again. “You would not find her so handsome
as her brother,” he said; and it was after this that he attempted
to dissuade the heir of the Duke of Bayswater from accepting Mrs.
Westgate’s invitation. “Depend upon it,” he said, “that girl means to
try for you.”

“It seems to me you are doing your best to make a fool of me,” the
modest young nobleman answered.

“She has been asking me,” said Beaumont, “all about your people and your
possessions.”

“I am sure it is very good of her!” Lord Lambeth rejoined.

“Well, then,” observed his companion, “if you go, you go with your eyes
open.”

“Damn my eyes!” exclaimed Lord Lambeth. “If one is to be a dozen times
a day at the house, it is a great deal more convenient to sleep there. I
am sick of traveling up and down this beastly avenue.”

Since he had determined to go, Percy Beaumont would, of course, have
been very sorry to allow him to go alone; he was a man of conscience,
and he remembered his promise to the duchess. It was obviously the
memory of this promise that made him say to his companion a couple of
days later that he rather wondered he should be so fond of that girl.

“In the first place, how do you know how fond I am of her?” asked Lord
Lambeth. “And, in the second place, why shouldn’t I be fond of her?”

“I shouldn’t think she would be in your line.”

“What do you call my ‘line’? You don’t set her down as ‘fast’?”

“Exactly so. Mrs. Westgate tells me that there is no such thing as the
‘fast girl’ in America; that it’s an English invention, and that the
term has no meaning here.”

“All the better. It’s an animal I detest.”

“You prefer a bluestocking.”

“Is that what you call Miss Alden?”

“Her sister tells me,” said Percy Beaumont, “that she is tremendously
literary.”

“I don’t know anything about that. She is certainly very clever.”

“Well,” said Beaumont, “I should have supposed you would have found that
sort of thing awfully slow.”

“In point of fact,” Lord Lambeth rejoined, “I find it uncommonly
lively.”

After this, Percy Beaumont held his tongue; but on the 10th of August
he wrote to the Duchess of Bayswater. He was, as I have said, a man of
conscience, and he had a strong, incorruptible sense of the proprieties
of life. His kinsman, meanwhile, was having a great deal of talk with
Bessie Alden--on the red sea rocks beyond the lawn; in the course of
long island rides, with a slow return in the glowing twilight; on the
deep veranda late in the evening. Lord Lambeth, who had stayed at many
houses, had never stayed at a house in which it was possible for a young
man to converse so frequently with a young lady. This young lady
no longer applied to Percy Beaumont for information concerning his
lordship. She addressed herself directly to the young nobleman. She
asked him a great many questions, some of which bored him a little; for
he took no pleasure in talking about himself.

“Lord Lambeth,” said Bessie Alden, “are you a hereditary legislator?”

“Oh, I say!” cried Lord Lambeth, “don’t make me call myself such names
as that.”

“But you are a member of Parliament,” said the young girl.

“I don’t like the sound of that, either.”

“Don’t you sit in the House of Lords?” Bessie Alden went on.

“Very seldom,” said Lord Lambeth.

“Is it an important position?” she asked.

“Oh, dear, no,” said Lord Lambeth.

“I should think it would be very grand,” said Bessie Alden, “to possess,
simply by an accident of birth, the right to make laws for a great
nation.”

“Ah, but one doesn’t make laws. It’s a great humbug.”

“I don’t believe that,” the young girl declared. “It must be a great
privilege, and I should think that if one thought of it in the right
way--from a high point of view--it would be very inspiring.”

“The less one thinks of it, the better,” Lord Lambeth affirmed.

“I think it’s tremendous,” said Bessie Alden; and on another occasion
she asked him if he had any tenantry. Hereupon it was that, as I have
said, he was a little bored.

“Do you want to buy up their leases?” he asked.

“Well, have you got any livings?” she demanded.

“Oh, I say!” he cried. “Have you got a clergyman that is looking out?”
 But she made him tell her that he had a castle; he confessed to but one.
It was the place in which he had been born and brought up, and, as he
had an old-time liking for it, he was beguiled into describing it a
little and saying it was really very jolly. Bessie Alden listened with
great interest and declared that she would give the world to see such
a place. Whereupon--“It would be awfully kind of you to come and
stay there,” said Lord Lambeth. He took a vague satisfaction in the
circumstance that Percy Beaumont had not heard him make the remark I
have just recorded.

Mr. Westgate all this time had not, as they said at Newport, “come on.”
 His wife more than once announced that she expected him on the morrow;
but on the morrow she wandered about a little, with a telegram in
her jeweled fingers, declaring it was very tiresome that his business
detained him in New York; that he could only hope the Englishmen were
having a good time. “I must say,” said Mrs. Westgate, “that it is
no thanks to him if you are.” And she went on to explain, while she
continued that slow-paced promenade which enabled her well-adjusted
skirts to display themselves so advantageously, that unfortunately in
America there was no leisure class. It was Lord Lambeth’s theory, freely
propounded when the young men were together, that Percy Beaumont was
having a very good time with Mrs. Westgate, and that, under the pretext
of meeting for the purpose of animated discussion, they were indulging
in practices that imparted a shade of hypocrisy to the lady’s regret for
her husband’s absence.

“I assure you we are always discussing and differing,” said Percy
Beaumont. “She is awfully argumentative. American ladies certainly don’t
mind contradicting you. Upon my word I don’t think I was ever treated so
by a woman before. She’s so devilish positive.”

Mrs. Westgate’s positive quality, however, evidently had its
attractions, for Beaumont was constantly at his hostess’s side. He
detached himself one day to the extent of going to New York to talk
over the Tennessee Central with Mr. Westgate; but he was absent only
forty-eight hours, during which, with Mr. Westgate’s assistance, he
completely settled this piece of business. “They certainly do things
quickly in New York,” he observed to his cousin; and he added that
Mr. Westgate had seemed very uneasy lest his wife should miss her
visitor--he had been in such an awful hurry to send him back to her.
“I’m afraid you’ll never come up to an American husband, if that’s what
the wives expect,” he said to Lord Lambeth.

Mrs. Westgate, however, was not to enjoy much longer the entertainment
with which an indulgent husband had desired to keep her provided. On
the 21st of August Lord Lambeth received a telegram from his mother,
requesting him to return immediately to England; his father had been
taken ill, and it was his filial duty to come to him.

The young Englishman was visibly annoyed. “What the deuce does it mean?”
 he asked of his kinsman. “What am I to do?”

Percy Beaumont was annoyed as well; he had deemed it his duty, as I have
narrated, to write to the duchess, but he had not expected that this
distinguished woman would act so promptly upon his hint. “It means,”
 he said, “that your father is laid up. I don’t suppose it’s anything
serious; but you have no option. Take the first steamer; but don’t be
alarmed.”

Lord Lambeth made his farewells; but the few last words that he
exchanged with Bessie Alden are the only ones that have a place in our
record. “Of course I needn’t assure you,” he said, “that if you should
come to England next year, I expect to be the first person that you
inform of it.”

Bessie Alden looked at him a little, and she smiled. “Oh, if we come to
London,” she answered, “I should think you would hear of it.”

Percy Beaumont returned with his cousin, and his sense of duty compelled
him, one windless afternoon, in mid-Atlantic, to say to Lord Lambeth
that he suspected that the duchess’s telegram was in part the result
of something he himself had written to her. “I wrote to her--as I
explicitly notified you I had promised to do--that you were extremely
interested in a little American girl.”

Lord Lambeth was extremely angry, and he indulged for some moments
in the simple language of indignation. But I have said that he was a
reasonable young man, and I can give no better proof of it than the fact
that he remarked to his companion at the end of half an hour, “You were
quite right, after all. I am very much interested in her. Only, to
be fair,” he added, “you should have told my mother also that she is
not--seriously--interested in me.”

Percy Beaumont gave a little laugh. “There is nothing so charming as
modesty in a young man in your position. That speech is a capital proof
that you are sweet on her.”

“She is not interested--she is not!” Lord Lambeth repeated.

“My dear fellow,” said his companion, “you are very far gone.”



PART II


In point of fact, as Percy Beaumont would have said, Mrs. Westgate
disembarked on the 18th of May on the British coast. She was accompanied
by her sister, but she was not attended by any other member of her
family. To the deprivation of her husband’s society Mrs. Westgate
was, however, habituated; she had made half a dozen journeys to Europe
without him, and she now accounted for his absence, to interrogative
friends on this side of the Atlantic, by allusion to the regrettable
but conspicuous fact that in America there was no leisure class. The
two ladies came up to London and alighted at Jones’s Hotel, where Mrs.
Westgate, who had made on former occasions the most agreeable impression
at this establishment, received an obsequious greeting. Bessie Alden
had felt much excited about coming to England; she had expected the
“associations” would be very charming, that it would be an infinite
pleasure to rest her eyes upon the things she had read about in the
poets and historians. She was very fond of the poets and historians,
of the picturesque, of the past, of retrospect, of mementos and
reverberations of greatness; so that on coming into the English world,
where strangeness and familiarity would go hand in hand, she
was prepared for a multitude of fresh emotions. They began very
promptly--these tender, fluttering sensations; they began with the sight
of the beautiful English landscape, whose dark richness was quickened
and brightened by the season; with the carpeted fields and flowering
hedgerows, as she looked at them from the window of the train; with the
spires of the rural churches peeping above the rook-haunted treetops;
with the oak-studded parks, the ancient homes, the cloudy light,
the speech, the manners, the thousand differences. Mrs. Westgate’s
impressions had, of course, much less novelty and keenness, and she gave
but a wandering attention to her sister’s ejaculations and rhapsodies.

“You know my enjoyment of England is not so intellectual as Bessie’s,”
 she said to several of her friends in the course of her visit to this
country. “And yet if it is not intellectual, I can’t say it is physical.
I don’t think I can quite say what it is, my enjoyment of England.” When
once it was settled that the two ladies should come abroad and should
spend a few weeks in England on their way to the Continent, they of
course exchanged a good many allusions to their London acquaintance.

“It will certainly be much nicer having friends there,” Bessie Alden had
said one day as she sat on the sunny deck of the steamer at her sister’s
feet on a large blue rug.

“Whom do you mean by friends?” Mrs. Westgate asked.

“All those English gentlemen whom you have known and entertained.
Captain Littledale, for instance. And Lord Lambeth and Mr. Beaumont,”
 added Bessie Alden.

“Do you expect them to give us a very grand reception?”

Bessie reflected a moment; she was addicted, as we know, to reflection.
“Well, yes.”

“My poor, sweet child,” murmured her sister.

“What have I said that is so silly?” asked Bessie.

“You are a little too simple; just a little. It is very becoming, but it
pleases people at your expense.”

“I am certainly too simple to understand you,” said Bessie.

“Shall I tell you a story?” asked her sister.

“If you would be so good. That is what they do to amuse simple people.”

Mrs. Westgate consulted her memory, while her companion sat gazing at
the shining sea. “Did you ever hear of the Duke of Green-Erin?”

“I think not,” said Bessie.

“Well, it’s no matter,” her sister went on.

“It’s a proof of my simplicity.”

“My story is meant to illustrate that of some other people,” said Mrs.
Westgate. “The Duke of Green-Erin is what they call in England a great
swell, and some five years ago he came to America. He spent most of his
time in New York, and in New York he spent his days and his nights at
the Butterworths’. You have heard, at least, of the Butterworths. BIEN.
They did everything in the world for him--they turned themselves inside
out. They gave him a dozen dinner parties and balls and were the means
of his being invited to fifty more. At first he used to come into Mrs.
Butterworth’s box at the opera in a tweed traveling suit; but someone
stopped that. At any rate, he had a beautiful time, and they parted the
best friends in the world. Two years elapse, and the Butterworths come
abroad and go to London. The first thing they see in all the papers--in
England those things are in the most prominent place--is that the Duke
of Green-Erin has arrived in town for the Season. They wait a little,
and then Mr. Butterworth--as polite as ever--goes and leaves a card.
They wait a little more; the visit is not returned; they wait three
weeks--silence de mort--the Duke gives no sign. The Butterworths see
a lot of other people, put down the Duke of Green-Erin as a rude,
ungrateful man, and forget all about him. One fine day they go to Ascot
Races, and there they meet him face to face. He stares a moment and
then comes up to Mr. Butterworth, taking something from his
pocketbook--something which proves to be a banknote. ‘I’m glad to see
you, Mr. Butterworth,’ he says, ‘so that I can pay you that ten pounds
I lost to you in New York. I saw the other day you remembered our bet;
here are the ten pounds, Mr. Butterworth. Goodbye, Mr. Butterworth.’ And
off he goes, and that’s the last they see of the Duke of Green-Erin.”

“Is that your story?” asked Bessie Alden.

“Don’t you think it’s interesting?” her sister replied.

“I don’t believe it,” said the young girl.

“Ah,” cried Mrs. Westgate, “you are not so simple after all! Believe it
or not, as you please; there is no smoke without fire.”

“Is that the way,” asked Bessie after a moment, “that you expect your
friends to treat you?”

“I defy them to treat me very ill, because I shall not give them the
opportunity. With the best will in the world, in that case they can’t be
very offensive.”

Bessie Alden was silent a moment. “I don’t see what makes you talk that
way,” she said. “The English are a great people.”

“Exactly; and that is just the way they have grown great--by dropping
you when you have ceased to be useful. People say they are not clever;
but I think they are very clever.”

“You know you have liked them--all the Englishmen you have seen,” said
Bessie.

“They have liked me,” her sister rejoined; “it would be more correct to
say that. And, of course, one likes that.”

Bessie Alden resumed for some moments her studies in sea green. “Well,”
 she said, “whether they like me or not, I mean to like them. And
happily,” she added, “Lord Lambeth does not owe me ten pounds.”

During the first few days after their arrival at Jones’s Hotel our
charming Americans were much occupied with what they would have called
looking about them. They found occasion to make a large number of
purchases, and their opportunities for conversation were such only as
were offered by the deferential London shopmen. Bessie Alden, even
in driving from the station, took an immense fancy to the British
metropolis, and at the risk of exhibiting her as a young woman of vulgar
tastes it must be recorded that for a considerable period she desired no
higher pleasure than to drive about the crowded streets in a hansom cab.
To her attentive eyes they were full of a strange picturesque life, and
it is at least beneath the dignity of our historic muse to enumerate the
trivial objects and incidents which this simple young lady from Boston
found so entertaining. It may be freely mentioned, however, that
whenever, after a round of visits in Bond Street and Regent Street,
she was about to return with her sister to Jones’s Hotel, she made an
earnest request that they should be driven home by way of Westminster
Abbey. She had begun by asking whether it would not be possible to take
the Tower on the way to their lodgings; but it happened that at a more
primitive stage of her culture Mrs. Westgate had paid a visit to this
venerable monument, which she spoke of ever afterward vaguely as a
dreadful disappointment; so that she expressed the liveliest disapproval
of any attempt to combine historical researches with the purchase of
hairbrushes and notepaper. The most she would consent to do in this line
was to spend half an hour at Madame Tussaud’s, where she saw several
dusty wax effigies of members of the royal family. She told Bessie that
if she wished to go to the Tower she must get someone else to take her.
Bessie expressed hereupon an earnest disposition to go alone; but upon
this proposal as well Mrs. Westgate sprinkled cold water.

“Remember,” she said, “that you are not in your innocent little Boston.
It is not a question of walking up and down Beacon Street.” Then she
went on to explain that there were two classes of American girls in
Europe--those that walked about alone and those that did not. “You
happen to belong, my dear,” she said to her sister, “to the class that
does not.”

“It is only,” answered Bessie, laughing, “because you happen to prevent
me.” And she devoted much private meditation to this question of
effecting a visit to the Tower of London.

Suddenly it seemed as if the problem might be solved; the two ladies at
Jones’s Hotel received a visit from Willie Woodley. Such was the social
appellation of a young American who had sailed from New York a few days
after their own departure, and who, having the privilege of intimacy
with them in that city, had lost no time, on his arrival in London,
in coming to pay them his respects. He had, in fact, gone to see them
directly after going to see his tailor, than which there can be no
greater exhibition of promptitude on the part of a young American who
has just alighted at the Charing Cross Hotel. He was a slim, pale youth,
of the most amiable disposition, famous for the skill with which he led
the “German” in New York. Indeed, by the young ladies who habitually
figured in this Terpsichorean revel he was believed to be “the best
dancer in the world”; it was in these terms that he was always spoken
of, and that his identity was indicated. He was the gentlest, softest
young man it was possible to meet; he was beautifully dressed--“in the
English style”--and he knew an immense deal about London. He had been
at Newport during the previous summer, at the time of our young
Englishmen’s visit, and he took extreme pleasure in the society of
Bessie Alden, whom he always addressed as “Miss Bessie.” She immediately
arranged with him, in the presence of her sister, that he should conduct
her to the scene of Anne Boleyn’s execution.

“You may do as you please,” said Mrs. Westgate. “Only--if you desire the
information--it is not the custom here for young ladies to knock about
London with young men.”

“Miss Bessie has waltzed with me so often,” observed Willie Woodley;
“she can surely go out with me in a hansom.”

“I consider waltzing,” said Mrs. Westgate, “the most innocent pleasure
of our time.”

“It’s a compliment to our time!” exclaimed the young man with a little
laugh, in spite of himself.

“I don’t see why I should regard what is done here,” said Bessie Alden.
“Why should I suffer the restrictions of a society of which I enjoy none
of the privileges?”

“That’s very good--very good,” murmured Willie Woodley.

“Oh, go to the Tower, and feel the ax, if you like,” said Mrs. Westgate.
“I consent to your going with Mr. Woodley; but I should not let you go
with an Englishman.”

“Miss Bessie wouldn’t care to go with an Englishman!” Mr. Woodley
declared with a faint asperity that was, perhaps, not unnatural in a
young man, who, dressing in the manner that I have indicated and knowing
a great deal, as I have said, about London, saw no reason for drawing
these sharp distinctions. He agreed upon a day with Miss Bessie--a day
of that same week.

An ingenious mind might, perhaps, trace a connection between the young
girl’s allusion to her destitution of social privileges and a question
she asked on the morrow as she sat with her sister at lunch.

“Don’t you mean to write to--to anyone?” said Bessie.

“I wrote this morning to Captain Littledale,” Mrs. Westgate replied.

“But Mr. Woodley said that Captain Littledale had gone to India.”

“He said he thought he had heard so; he knew nothing about it.”

For a moment Bessie Alden said nothing more; then, at last, “And don’t
you intend to write to--to Mr. Beaumont?” she inquired.

“You mean to Lord Lambeth,” said her sister.

“I said Mr. Beaumont because he was so good a friend of yours.”

Mrs. Westgate looked at the young girl with sisterly candor. “I don’t
care two straws for Mr. Beaumont.”

“You were certainly very nice to him.”

“I am nice to everyone,” said Mrs. Westgate simply.

“To everyone but me,” rejoined Bessie, smiling.

Her sister continued to look at her; then, at last, “Are you in love
with Lord Lambeth?” she asked.

The young girl stared a moment, and the question was apparently too
humorous even to make her blush. “Not that I know of,” she answered.

“Because if you are,” Mrs. Westgate went on, “I shall certainly not send
for him.”

“That proves what I said,” declared Bessie, smiling--“that you are not
nice to me.”

“It would be a poor service, my dear child,” said her sister.

“In what sense? There is nothing against Lord Lambeth that I know of.”

Mrs. Westgate was silent a moment. “You ARE in love with him then?”

Bessie stared again; but this time she blushed a little. “Ah! if you
won’t be serious,” she answered, “we will not mention him again.”

For some moments Lord Lambeth was not mentioned again, and it was Mrs.
Westgate who, at the end of this period, reverted to him. “Of course I
will let him know we are here, because I think he would be hurt--justly
enough--if we should go away without seeing him. It is fair to give
him a chance to come and thank me for the kindness we showed him. But I
don’t want to seem eager.”

“Neither do I,” said Bessie with a little laugh.

“Though I confess,” added her sister, “that I am curious to see how he
will behave.”

“He behaved very well at Newport.”

“Newport is not London. At Newport he could do as he liked; but here it
is another affair. He has to have an eye to consequences.”

“If he had more freedom, then, at Newport,” argued Bessie, “it is the
more to his credit that he behaved well; and if he has to be so careful
here, it is possible he will behave even better.”

“Better--better,” repeated her sister. “My dear child, what is your
point of view?”

“How do you mean--my point of view?”

“Don’t you care for Lord Lambeth--a little?”

This time Bessie Alden was displeased; she slowly got up from the
table, turning her face away from her sister. “You will oblige me by not
talking so,” she said.

Mrs. Westgate sat watching her for some moments as she moved slowly
about the room and went and stood at the window. “I will write to him
this afternoon,” she said at last.

“Do as you please!” Bessie answered; and presently she turned round. “I
am not afraid to say that I like Lord Lambeth. I like him very much.”

“He is not clever,” Mrs. Westgate declared.

“Well, there have been clever people whom I have disliked,” said Bessie
Alden; “so that I suppose I may like a stupid one. Besides, Lord Lambeth
is not stupid.”

“Not so stupid as he looks!” exclaimed her sister, smiling.

“If I were in love with Lord Lambeth, as you said just now, it would be
bad policy on your part to abuse him.”

“My dear child, don’t give me lessons in policy!” cried Mrs. Westgate.
“The policy I mean to follow is very deep.”

The young girl began to walk about the room again; then she stopped
before her sister. “I have never heard in the course of five minutes,”
 she said, “so many hints and innuendoes. I wish you would tell me in
plain English what you mean.”

“I mean that you may be much annoyed.”

“That is still only a hint,” said Bessie.

Her sister looked at her, hesitating an instant. “It will be said of you
that you have come after Lord Lambeth--that you followed him.”

Bessie Alden threw back her pretty head like a startled hind, and a look
flashed into her face that made Mrs. Westgate rise from her chair. “Who
says such things as that?” she demanded.

“People here.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Bessie.

“You have a very convenient faculty of doubt. But my policy will be, as
I say, very deep. I shall leave you to find out this kind of thing for
yourself.”

Bessie fixed her eyes upon her sister, and Mrs. Westgate thought for
a moment there were tears in them. “Do they talk that way here?” she
asked.

“You will see. I shall leave you alone.”

“Don’t leave me alone,” said Bessie Alden. “Take me away.”

“No; I want to see what you make of it,” her sister continued.

“I don’t understand.”

“You will understand after Lord Lambeth has come,” said Mrs. Westgate
with a little laugh.

The two ladies had arranged that on this afternoon Willie Woodley should
go with them to Hyde Park, where Bessie Alden expected to derive much
entertainment from sitting on a little green chair, under the great
trees, beside Rotten Row. The want of a suitable escort had hitherto
rendered this pleasure inaccessible; but no escort now, for such an
expedition, could have been more suitable than their devoted young
countryman, whose mission in life, it might almost be said, was to find
chairs for ladies, and who appeared on the stroke of half-past five with
a white camellia in his buttonhole.

“I have written to Lord Lambeth, my dear,” said Mrs. Westgate to her
sister, on coming into the room where Bessie Alden, drawing on her long
gray gloves, was entertaining their visitor.

Bessie said nothing, but Willie Woodley exclaimed that his lordship was
in town; he had seen his name in the Morning Post.

“Do you read the Morning Post?” asked Mrs. Westgate.

“Oh, yes; it’s great fun,” Willie Woodley affirmed.

“I want so to see it,” said Bessie; “there is so much about it in
Thackeray.”

“I will send it to you every morning,” said Willie Woodley.

He found them what Bessie Alden thought excellent places, under the
great trees, beside the famous avenue whose humors had been made
familiar to the young girl’s childhood by the pictures in Punch. The
day was bright and warm, and the crowd of riders and spectators, and the
great procession of carriages, were proportionately dense and brilliant.
The scene bore the stamp of the London Season at its height, and Bessie
Alden found more entertainment in it than she was able to express to
her companions. She sat silent, under her parasol, and her imagination,
according to its wont, let itself loose into the great changing
assemblage of striking and suggestive figures. They stirred up a host
of old impressions and preconceptions, and she found herself fitting a
history to this person and a theory to that, and making a place for them
all in her little private museum of types. But if she said little, her
sister on one side and Willie Woodley on the other expressed themselves
in lively alternation.

“Look at that green dress with blue flounces,” said Mrs. Westgate.
“Quelle toilette!”

“That’s the Marquis of Blackborough,” said the young man--“the one in
the white coat. I heard him speak the other night in the House of Lords;
it was something about ramrods; he called them ‘wamwods.’ He’s an awful
swell.”

“Did you ever see anything like the way they are pinned back?” Mrs.
Westgate resumed. “They never know where to stop.”

“They do nothing but stop,” said Willie Woodley. “It prevents them from
walking. Here comes a great celebrity--Lady Beatrice Bellevue. She’s
awfully fast; see what little steps she takes.”

“Well, my dear,” Mrs. Westgate pursued, “I hope you are getting some
ideas for your couturiere?”

“I am getting plenty of ideas,” said Bessie, “but I don’t know that my
couturiere would appreciate them.”

Willie Woodley presently perceived a friend on horseback, who drove up
beside the barrier of the Row and beckoned to him. He went forward, and
the crowd of pedestrians closed about him, so that for some ten minutes
he was hidden from sight. At last he reappeared, bringing a gentleman
with him--a gentleman whom Bessie at first supposed to be his friend
dismounted. But at a second glance she found herself looking at Lord
Lambeth, who was shaking hands with her sister.

“I found him over there,” said Willie Woodley, “and I told him you were
here.”

And then Lord Lambeth, touching his hat a little, shook hands with
Bessie. “Fancy your being here!” he said. He was blushing and smiling;
he looked very handsome, and he had a kind of splendor that he had not
had in America. Bessie Alden’s imagination, as we know, was just then in
exercise; so that the tall young Englishman, as he stood there looking
down at her, had the benefit of it. “He is handsomer and more splendid
than anything I have ever seen,” she said to herself. And then she
remembered that he was a marquis, and she thought he looked like a
marquis.

“I say, you know,” he cried, “you ought to have let a man know you were
here!”

“I wrote to you an hour ago,” said Mrs. Westgate.

“Doesn’t all the world know it?” asked Bessie, smiling.

“I assure you I didn’t know it!” cried Lord Lambeth. “Upon my honor I
hadn’t heard of it. Ask Woodley now; had I, Woodley?”

“Well, I think you are rather a humbug,” said Willie Woodley.

“You don’t believe that--do you, Miss Alden?” asked his lordship. “You
don’t believe I’m a humbug, eh?”

“No,” said Bessie, “I don’t.”

“You are too tall to stand up, Lord Lambeth,” Mrs. Westgate observed.
“You are only tolerable when you sit down. Be so good as to get a
chair.”

He found a chair and placed it sidewise, close to the two ladies. “If I
hadn’t met Woodley I should never have found you,” he went on. “Should
I, Woodley?”

“Well, I guess not,” said the young American.

“Not even with my letter?” asked Mrs. Westgate.

“Ah, well, I haven’t got your letter yet; I suppose I shall get it this
evening. It was awfully kind of you to write.”

“So I said to Bessie,” observed Mrs. Westgate.

“Did she say so, Miss Alden?” Lord Lambeth inquired. “I daresay you have
been here a month.”

“We have been here three,” said Mrs. Westgate.

“Have you been here three months?” the young man asked again of Bessie.

“It seems a long time,” Bessie answered.

“I say, after that you had better not call me a humbug!” cried Lord
Lambeth. “I have only been in town three weeks; but you must have been
hiding away; I haven’t seen you anywhere.”

“Where should you have seen us--where should we have gone?” asked Mrs.
Westgate.

“You should have gone to Hurlingham,” said Willie Woodley.

“No; let Lord Lambeth tell us,” Mrs. Westgate insisted.

“There are plenty of places to go to,” said Lord Lambeth; “each one
stupider than the other. I mean people’s houses; they send you cards.”

“No one has sent us cards,” said Bessie.

“We are very quiet,” her sister declared. “We are here as travelers.”

“We have been to Madame Tussaud’s,” Bessie pursued.

“Oh, I say!” cried Lord Lambeth.

“We thought we should find your image there,” said Mrs. Westgate--“yours
and Mr. Beaumont’s.”

“In the Chamber of Horrors?” laughed the young man.

“It did duty very well for a party,” said Mrs. Westgate. “All the women
were decolletes, and many of the figures looked as if they could speak
if they tried.”

“Upon my word,” Lord Lambeth rejoined, “you see people at London parties
that look as if they couldn’t speak if they tried.”

“Do you think Mr. Woodley could find us Mr. Beaumont?” asked Mrs.
Westgate.

Lord Lambeth stared and looked round him. “I daresay he could. Beaumont
often comes here. Don’t you think you could find him, Woodley? Make a
dive into the crowd.”

“Thank you; I have had enough diving,” said Willie Woodley. “I will wait
till Mr. Beaumont comes to the surface.”

“I will bring him to see you,” said Lord Lambeth; “where are you
staying?”

“You will find the address in my letter--Jones’s Hotel.”

“Oh, one of those places just out of Piccadilly? Beastly hole, isn’t
it?” Lord Lambeth inquired.

“I believe it’s the best hotel in London,” said Mrs. Westgate.

“But they give you awful rubbish to eat, don’t they?” his lordship went
on.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Westgate.

“I always feel so sorry for the people that come up to town and go to
live in those places,” continued the young man. “They eat nothing but
filth.”

“Oh, I say!” cried Willie Woodley.

“Well, how do you like London, Miss Alden?” Lord Lambeth asked,
unperturbed by this ejaculation.

“I think it’s grand,” said Bessie Alden.

“My sister likes it, in spite of the ‘filth’!” Mrs. Westgate exclaimed.

“I hope you are going to stay a long time.”

“As long as I can,” said Bessie.

“And where is Mr. Westgate?” asked Lord Lambeth of this gentleman’s
wife.

“He’s where he always is--in that tiresome New York.”

“He must be tremendously clever,” said the young man.

“I suppose he is,” said Mrs. Westgate.

Lord Lambeth sat for nearly an hour with his American friends; but it
is not our purpose to relate their conversation in full. He addressed
a great many remarks to Bessie Alden, and finally turned toward her
altogether, while Willie Woodley entertained Mrs. Westgate. Bessie
herself said very little; she was on her guard, thinking of what
her sister had said to her at lunch. Little by little, however, she
interested herself in Lord Lambeth again, as she had done at Newport;
only it seemed to her that here he might become more interesting. He
would be an unconscious part of the antiquity, the impressiveness, the
picturesqueness, of England; and poor Bessie Alden, like many a Yankee
maiden, was terribly at the mercy of picturesqueness.

“I have often wished I were at Newport again,” said the young man.
“Those days I spent at your sister’s were awfully jolly.”

“We enjoyed them very much; I hope your father is better.”

“Oh, dear, yes. When I got to England, he was out grouse shooting.
It was what you call in America a gigantic fraud. My mother had got
nervous. My three weeks at Newport seemed like a happy dream.”

“America certainly is very different from England,” said Bessie.

“I hope you like England better, eh?” Lord Lambeth rejoined almost
persuasively.

“No Englishman can ask that seriously of a person of another country.”

Her companion looked at her for a moment. “You mean it’s a matter of
course?”

“If I were English,” said Bessie, “it would certainly seem to me a
matter of course that everyone should be a good patriot.”

“Oh, dear, yes, patriotism is everything,” said Lord Lambeth, not quite
following, but very contented. “Now, what are you going to do here?”

“On Thursday I am going to the Tower.”

“The Tower?”

“The Tower of London. Did you never hear of it?”

“Oh, yes, I have been there,” said Lord Lambeth. “I was taken there
by my governess when I was six years old. It’s a rum idea, your going
there.”

“Do give me a few more rum ideas,” said Bessie. “I want to see
everything of that sort. I am going to Hampton Court, and to Windsor,
and to the Dulwich Gallery.”

Lord Lambeth seemed greatly amused. “I wonder you don’t go to the
Rosherville Gardens.”

“Are they interesting?” asked Bessie.

“Oh, wonderful.”

“Are they very old? That’s all I care for,” said Bessie.

“They are tremendously old; they are all falling to ruins.”

“I think there is nothing so charming as an old ruinous garden,” said
the young girl. “We must certainly go there.”

Lord Lambeth broke out into merriment. “I say, Woodley,” he cried,
“here’s Miss Alden wants to go to the Rosherville Gardens!”

Willie Woodley looked a little blank; he was caught in the fact of
ignorance of an apparently conspicuous feature of London life. But in
a moment he turned it off. “Very well,” he said, “I’ll write for a
permit.”

Lord Lambeth’s exhilaration increased. “Gad, I believe you Americans
would go anywhere!” he cried.

“We wish to go to Parliament,” said Bessie. “That’s one of the first
things.”

“Oh, it would bore you to death!” cried the young man.

“We wish to hear you speak.”

“I never speak--except to young ladies,” said Lord Lambeth, smiling.

Bessie Alden looked at him a while, smiling, too, in the shadow of her
parasol. “You are very strange,” she murmured. “I don’t think I approve
of you.”

“Ah, now, don’t be severe, Miss Alden,” said Lord Lambeth, smiling still
more. “Please don’t be severe. I want you to like me--awfully.”

“To like you awfully? You must not laugh at me, then, when I make
mistakes. I consider it my right--as a freeborn American--to make as
many mistakes as I choose.”

“Upon my word, I didn’t laugh at you,” said Lord Lambeth.

“And not only that,” Bessie went on; “but I hold that all my mistakes
shall be set down to my credit. You must think the better of me for
them.”

“I can’t think better of you than I do,” the young man declared.

Bessie Alden looked at him a moment again. “You certainly speak very
well to young ladies. But why don’t you address the House?--isn’t that
what they call it?”

“Because I have nothing to say,” said Lord Lambeth.

“Haven’t you a great position?” asked Bessie Alden.

He looked a moment at the back of his glove. “I’ll set that down,” he
said, “as one of your mistakes--to your credit.” And as if he disliked
talking about his position, he changed the subject. “I wish you would
let me go with you to the Tower, and to Hampton Court, and to all those
other places.”

“We shall be most happy,” said Bessie.

“And of course I shall be delighted to show you the House of Lords--some
day that suits you. There are a lot of things I want to do for you.
I want to make you have a good time. And I should like very much to
present some of my friends to you, if it wouldn’t bore you. Then it
would be awfully kind of you to come down to Branches.”

“We are much obliged to you, Lord Lambeth,” said Bessie. “What is
Branches?”

“It’s a house in the country. I think you might like it.”

Willie Woodley and Mrs. Westgate at this moment were sitting in silence,
and the young man’s ear caught these last words of Lord Lambeth’s.
“He’s inviting Miss Bessie to one of his castles,” he murmured to his
companion.

Mrs. Westgate, foreseeing what she mentally called “complications,”
 immediately got up; and the two ladies, taking leave of Lord Lambeth,
returned, under Mr. Woodley’s conduct, to Jones’s Hotel.

Lord Lambeth came to see them on the morrow, bringing Percy Beaumont
with him--the latter having instantly declared his intention of
neglecting none of the usual offices of civility. This declaration,
however, when his kinsman informed him of the advent of their American
friends, had been preceded by another remark.

“Here they are, then, and you are in for it.”

“What am I in for?” demanded Lord Lambeth.

“I will let your mother give it a name. With all respect to whom,” added
Percy Beaumont, “I must decline on this occasion to do any more police
duty. Her Grace must look after you herself.”

“I will give her a chance,” said her Grace’s son, a trifle grimly. “I
shall make her go and see them.”

“She won’t do it, my boy.”

“We’ll see if she doesn’t,” said Lord Lambeth.

But if Percy Beaumont took a somber view of the arrival of the two
ladies at Jones’s Hotel, he was sufficiently a man of the world to
offer them a smiling countenance. He fell into animated
conversation--conversation, at least, that was animated on her
side--with Mrs. Westgate, while his companion made himself agreeable
to the younger lady. Mrs. Westgate began confessing and protesting,
declaring and expounding.

“I must say London is a great deal brighter and prettier just now
than it was when I was here last--in the month of November. There
is evidently a great deal going on, and you seem to have a good many
flowers. I have no doubt it is very charming for all you people, and
that you amuse yourselves immensely. It is very good of you to let
Bessie and me come and sit and look at you. I suppose you will think I
am very satirical, but I must confess that that’s the feeling I have in
London.”

“I am afraid I don’t quite understand to what feeling you allude,” said
Percy Beaumont.

“The feeling that it’s all very well for you English people. Everything
is beautifully arranged for you.”

“It seems to me it is very well for some Americans, sometimes,” rejoined
Beaumont.

“For some of them, yes--if they like to be patronized. But I must say I
don’t like to be patronized. I may be very eccentric, and undisciplined,
and outrageous, but I confess I never was fond of patronage. I like
to associate with people on the same terms as I do in my own country;
that’s a peculiar taste that I have. But here people seem to expect
something else--Heaven knows what! I am afraid you will think I am very
ungrateful, for I certainly have received a great deal of attention. The
last time I was here, a lady sent me a message that I was at liberty to
come and see her.”

“Dear me! I hope you didn’t go,” observed Percy Beaumont.

“You are deliciously naive, I must say that for you!” Mrs. Westgate
exclaimed. “It must be a great advantage to you here in London. I
suppose that if I myself had a little more naivete, I should enjoy it
more. I should be content to sit on a chair in the park, and see the
people pass, and be told that this is the Duchess of Suffolk, and that
is the Lord Chamberlain, and that I must be thankful for the privilege
of beholding them. I daresay it is very wicked and critical of me to ask
for anything else. But I was always critical, and I freely confess to
the sin of being fastidious. I am told there is some remarkably superior
second-rate society provided here for strangers. MERCI! I don’t want
any superior second-rate society. I want the society that I have been
accustomed to.”

“I hope you don’t call Lambeth and me second rate,” Beaumont interposed.

“Oh, I am accustomed to you,” said Mrs. Westgate. “Do you know that you
English sometimes make the most wonderful speeches? The first time I
came to London I went out to dine--as I told you, I have received a
great deal of attention. After dinner, in the drawing room, I had some
conversation with an old lady; I assure you I had. I forget what we
talked about, but she presently said, in allusion to something we were
discussing, ‘Oh, you know, the aristocracy do so-and-so; but in one’s
own class of life it is very different.’ In one’s own class of life!
What is a poor unprotected American woman to do in a country where she
is liable to have that sort of thing said to her?”

“You seem to get hold of some very queer old ladies; I compliment you
on your acquaintance!” Percy Beaumont exclaimed. “If you are trying to
bring me to admit that London is an odious place, you’ll not succeed.
I’m extremely fond of it, and I think it the jolliest place in the
world.”

“POUR VOUS AUTRES. I never said the contrary,” Mrs. Westgate retorted.
I make use of this expression, because both interlocutors had begun to
raise their voices. Percy Beaumont naturally did not like to hear his
country abused, and Mrs. Westgate, no less naturally, did not like a
stubborn debater.

“Hallo!” said Lord Lambeth; “what are they up to now?” And he came away
from the window, where he had been standing with Bessie Alden.

“I quite agree with a very clever countrywoman of mine,” Mrs. Westgate
continued with charming ardor, though with imperfect relevancy. She
smiled at the two gentlemen for a moment with terrible brightness, as
if to toss at their feet--upon their native heath--the gauntlet of
defiance. “For me, there are only two social positions worth speaking
of--that of an American lady and that of the Emperor of Russia.”

“And what do you do with the American gentlemen?” asked Lord Lambeth.

“She leaves them in America!” said Percy Beaumont.

On the departure of their visitors, Bessie Alden told her sister that
Lord Lambeth would come the next day, to go with them to the Tower, and
that he had kindly offered to bring his “trap” and drive them thither.
Mrs. Westgate listened in silence to this communication, and for some
time afterward she said nothing. But at last, “If you had not requested
me the other day not to mention it,” she began, “there is something I
should venture to ask you.” Bessie frowned a little; her dark blue eyes
were more dark than blue. But her sister went on. “As it is, I will
take the risk. You are not in love with Lord Lambeth: I believe it,
perfectly. Very good. But is there, by chance, any danger of your
becoming so? It’s a very simple question; don’t take offense. I have a
particular reason,” said Mrs. Westgate, “for wanting to know.”

Bessie Alden for some moments said nothing; she only looked displeased.
“No; there is no danger,” she answered at last, curtly.

“Then I should like to frighten them,” declared Mrs. Westgate, clasping
her jeweled hands.

“To frighten whom?”

“All these people; Lord Lambeth’s family and friends.”

“How should you frighten them?” asked the young girl.

“It wouldn’t be I--it would be you. It would frighten them to think that
you should absorb his lordship’s young affections.”

Bessie Alden, with her clear eyes still overshadowed by her dark brows,
continued to interrogate. “Why should that frighten them?”

Mrs. Westgate poised her answer with a smile before delivering it.
“Because they think you are not good enough. You are a charming girl,
beautiful and amiable, intelligent and clever, and as bien-elevee as it
is possible to be; but you are not a fit match for Lord Lambeth.”

Bessie Alden was decidedly disgusted. “Where do you get such
extraordinary ideas?” she asked. “You have said some such strange things
lately. My dear Kitty, where do you collect them?”

Kitty was evidently enamored of her idea. “Yes, it would put them on
pins and needles, and it wouldn’t hurt you. Mr. Beaumont is already most
uneasy; I could soon see that.”

The young girl meditated a moment. “Do you mean that they spy upon
him--that they interfere with him?”

“I don’t know what power they have to interfere, but I know that a
British mama may worry her son’s life out.”

It has been intimated that, as regards certain disagreeable things,
Bessie Alden had a fund of skepticism. She abstained on the present
occasion from expressing disbelief, for she wished not to irritate her
sister. But she said to herself that Kitty had been misinformed--that
this was a traveler’s tale. Though she was a girl of a lively
imagination, there could in the nature of things be, to her sense, no
reality in the idea of her belonging to a vulgar category. What she
said aloud was, “I must say that in that case I am very sorry for Lord
Lambeth.”

Mrs. Westgate, more and more exhilarated by her scheme, was smiling at
her again. “If I could only believe it was safe!” she exclaimed. “When
you begin to pity him, I, on my side, am afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Of your pitying him too much.”

Bessie Alden turned away impatiently; but at the end of a minute she
turned back. “What if I should pity him too much?” she asked.

Mrs. Westgate hereupon turned away, but after a moment’s reflection
she also faced her sister again. “It would come, after all, to the same
thing,” she said.

Lord Lambeth came the next day with his trap, and the two ladies,
attended by Willie Woodley, placed themselves under his guidance, and
were conveyed eastward, through some of the duskier portions of the
metropolis, to the great turreted donjon which overlooks the London
shipping. They all descended from their vehicle and entered the famous
inclosure; and they secured the services of a venerable beefeater, who,
though there were many other claimants for legendary information, made
a fine exclusive party of them and marched them through courts and
corridors, through armories and prisons. He delivered his usual
peripatetic discourse, and they stopped and stared, and peeped and
stooped, according to the official admonitions. Bessie Alden asked the
old man in the crimson doublet a great many questions; she thought it
a most fascinating place. Lord Lambeth was in high good humor; he was
constantly laughing; he enjoyed what he would have called the lark.
Willie Woodley kept looking at the ceilings and tapping the walls with
the knuckle of a pearl-gray glove; and Mrs. Westgate, asking at frequent
intervals to be allowed to sit down and wait till they came back, was as
frequently informed that they would never come back. To a great many of
Bessie’s questions--chiefly on collateral points of English history--the
ancient warder was naturally unable to reply; whereupon she always
appealed to Lord Lambeth. But his lordship was very ignorant. He
declared that he knew nothing about that sort of thing, and he seemed
greatly diverted at being treated as an authority.

“You can’t expect everyone to know as much as you,” he said.

“I should expect you to know a great deal more,” declared Bessie Alden.

“Women always know more than men about names and dates and that sort of
thing,” Lord Lambeth rejoined. “There was Lady Jane Grey we have just
been hearing about, who went in for Latin and Greek and all the learning
of her age.”

“YOU have no right to be ignorant, at all events,” said Bessie.

“Why haven’t I as good a right as anyone else?”

“Because you have lived in the midst of all these things.”

“What things do you mean? Axes, and blocks, and thumbscrews?”

“All these historical things. You belong to a historical family.”

“Bessie is really too historical,” said Mrs. Westgate, catching a word
of this dialogue.

“Yes, you are too historical,” said Lord Lambeth, laughing, but thankful
for a formula. “Upon my honor, you are too historical!”

He went with the ladies a couple of days later to Hampton Court, Willie
Woodley being also of the party. The afternoon was charming, the famous
horse chestnuts were in blossom, and Lord Lambeth, who quite entered
into the spirit of the cockney excursionist, declared that it was a
jolly old place. Bessie Alden was in ecstasies; she went about murmuring
and exclaiming.

“It’s too lovely,” said the young girl; “it’s too enchanting; it’s too
exactly what it ought to be!”

At Hampton Court the little flocks of visitors are not provided with an
official bellwether, but are left to browse at discretion upon the local
antiquities. It happened in this manner that, in default of another
informant, Bessie Alden, who on doubtful questions was able to suggest
a great many alternatives, found herself again applying for intellectual
assistance to Lord Lambeth. But he again assured her that he was utterly
helpless in such matters--that his education had been sadly neglected.

“And I am sorry it makes you unhappy,” he added in a moment.

“You are very disappointing, Lord Lambeth,” she said.

“Ah, now don’t say that,” he cried. “That’s the worst thing you could
possibly say.”

“No,” she rejoined, “it is not so bad as to say that I had expected
nothing of you.”

“I don’t know. Give me a notion of the sort of thing you expected.”

“Well,” said Bessie Alden, “that you would be more what I should like to
be--what I should try to be--in your place.”

“Ah, my place!” exclaimed Lord Lambeth. “You are always talking about my
place!”

The young girl looked at him; he thought she colored a little; and for a
moment she made no rejoinder.

“Does it strike you that I am always talking about your place?” she
asked.

“I am sure you do it a great honor,” he said, fearing he had been
uncivil.

“I have often thought about it,” she went on after a moment. “I have
often thought about your being a hereditary legislator. A hereditary
legislator ought to know a great many things.”

“Not if he doesn’t legislate.”

“But you do legislate; it’s absurd your saying you don’t. You are very
much looked up to here--I am assured of that.”

“I don’t know that I ever noticed it.”

“It is because you are used to it, then. You ought to fill the place.”

“How do you mean to fill it?” asked Lord Lambeth.

“You ought to be very clever and brilliant, and to know almost
everything.”

Lord Lambeth looked at her a moment. “Shall I tell you something?” he
asked. “A young man in my position, as you call it--”

“I didn’t invent the term,” interposed Bessie Alden. “I have seen it in
a great many books.”

“Hang it! you are always at your books. A fellow in my position, then,
does very well whatever he does. That’s about what I mean to say.”

“Well, if your own people are content with you,” said Bessie Alden,
laughing, “it is not for me to complain. But I shall always think that,
properly, you should have been a great mind--a great character.”

“Ah, that’s very theoretic,” Lord Lambeth declared. “Depend upon it,
that’s a Yankee prejudice.”

“Happy the country,” said Bessie Alden, “where even people’s prejudices
are so elevated!”

“Well, after all,” observed Lord Lambeth, “I don’t know that I am such a
fool as you are trying to make me out.”

“I said nothing so rude as that; but I must repeat that you are
disappointing.”

“My dear Miss Alden,” exclaimed the young man, “I am the best fellow in
the world!”

“Ah, if it were not for that!” said Bessie Alden with a smile.

Mrs. Westgate had a good many more friends in London than she pretended,
and before long she had renewed acquaintance with most of them. Their
hospitality was extreme, so that, one thing leading to another, she
began, as the phrase is, to go out. Bessie Alden, in this way, saw
something of what she found it a great satisfaction to call to herself
English society. She went to balls and danced, she went to dinners and
talked, she went to concerts and listened (at concerts Bessie always
listened), she went to exhibitions and wondered. Her enjoyment was
keen and her curiosity insatiable, and, grateful in general for all her
opportunities, she especially prized the privilege of meeting certain
celebrated persons--authors and artists, philosophers and statesmen--of
whose renown she had been a humble and distant beholder, and who now, as
a part of the habitual furniture of London drawing rooms, struck her
as stars fallen from the firmament and become palpable--revealing also
sometimes, on contact, qualities not to have been predicted of sidereal
bodies. Bessie, who knew so many of her contemporaries by reputation,
had a good many personal disappointments; but, on the other hand, she
had innumerable satisfactions and enthusiasms, and she communicated the
emotions of either class to a dear friend, of her own sex, in Boston,
with whom she was in voluminous correspondence. Some of her reflections,
indeed, she attempted to impart to Lord Lambeth, who came almost every
day to Jones’s Hotel, and whom Mrs. Westgate admitted to be really
devoted. Captain Littledale, it appeared, had gone to India; and of
several others of Mrs. Westgate’s ex-pensioners--gentlemen who, as she
said, had made, in New York, a clubhouse of her drawing room--no tidings
were to be obtained; but Lord Lambeth was certainly attentive enough to
make up for the accidental absences, the short memories, all the other
irregularities of everyone else. He drove them in the park, he took them
to visit private collections of pictures, and, having a house of his
own, invited them to dinner. Mrs. Westgate, following the fashion of
many of her compatriots, caused herself and her sister to be presented
at the English court by her diplomatic representative--for it was
in this manner that she alluded to the American minister to England,
inquiring what on earth he was put there for, if not to make the proper
arrangements for one’s going to a Drawing Room.

Lord Lambeth declared that he hated Drawing Rooms, but he participated
in the ceremony on the day on which the two ladies at Jones’s Hotel
repaired to Buckingham Palace in a remarkable coach which his lordship
had sent to fetch them. He had on a gorgeous uniform, and Bessie Alden
was particularly struck with his appearance--especially when on her
asking him, rather foolishly as she felt, if he were a loyal subject,
he replied that he was a loyal subject to HER. This declaration was
emphasized by his dancing with her at a royal ball to which the two
ladies afterward went, and was not impaired by the fact that she
thought he danced very ill. He seemed to her wonderfully kind; she asked
herself, with growing vivacity, why he should be so kind. It was his
disposition--that seemed the natural answer. She had told her sister
that she liked him very much, and now that she liked him more she
wondered why. She liked him for his disposition; to this question as
well that seemed the natural answer. When once the impressions of London
life began to crowd thickly upon her, she completely forgot her sister’s
warning about the cynicism of public opinion. It had given her great
pain at the moment, but there was no particular reason why she should
remember it; it corresponded too little with any sensible reality; and
it was disagreeable to Bessie to remember disagreeable things. So she
was not haunted with the sense of a vulgar imputation. She was not in
love with Lord Lambeth--she assured herself of that. It will immediately
be observed that when such assurances become necessary the state of a
young lady’s affections is already ambiguous; and, indeed, Bessie
Alden made no attempt to dissimulate--to herself, of course--a certain
tenderness that she felt for the young nobleman. She said to herself
that she liked the type to which he belonged--the simple, candid, manly,
healthy English temperament. She spoke to herself of him as women speak
of young men they like--alluded to his bravery (which she had never in
the least seen tested), to his honesty and gentlemanliness, and was not
silent upon the subject of his good looks. She was perfectly conscious,
moreover, that she liked to think of his more adventitious merits; that
her imagination was excited and gratified by the sight of a handsome
young man endowed with such large opportunities--opportunities she
hardly knew for what, but, as she supposed, for doing great things--for
setting an example, for exerting an influence, for conferring happiness,
for encouraging the arts. She had a kind of ideal of conduct for a young
man who should find himself in this magnificent position, and she tried
to adapt it to Lord Lambeth’s deportment as you might attempt to fit a
silhouette in cut paper upon a shadow projected upon a wall. But Bessie
Alden’s silhouette refused to coincide with his lordship’s image,
and this want of harmony sometimes vexed her more than she thought
reasonable. When he was absent it was, of course, less striking; then
he seemed to her a sufficiently graceful combination of high
responsibilities and amiable qualities. But when he sat there
within sight, laughing and talking with his customary good humor and
simplicity, she measured it more accurately, and she felt acutely that
if Lord Lambeth’s position was heroic, there was but little of the
hero in the young man himself. Then her imagination wandered away
from him--very far away; for it was an incontestable fact that at such
moments he seemed distinctly dull. I am afraid that while Bessie’s
imagination was thus invidiously roaming, she cannot have been herself
a very lively companion; but it may well have been that these occasional
fits of indifference seemed to Lord Lambeth a part of the young girl’s
personal charm. It had been a part of this charm from the first that
he felt that she judged him and measured him more freely and
irresponsibly--more at her ease and her leisure, as it were--than
several young ladies with whom he had been on the whole about as
intimate. To feel this, and yet to feel that she also liked him,
was very agreeable to Lord Lambeth. He fancied he had compassed that
gratification so desirable to young men of title and fortune--being
liked for himself. It is true that a cynical counselor might have
whispered to him, “Liked for yourself? Yes; but not so very much!” He
had, at any rate, the constant hope of being liked more.

It may seem, perhaps, a trifle singular--but it is nevertheless
true--that Bessie Alden, when he struck her as dull, devoted some time,
on grounds of conscience, to trying to like him more. I say on grounds
of conscience because she felt that he had been extremely “nice” to her
sister, and because she reflected that it was no more than fair that
she should think as well of him as he thought of her. This effort was
possibly sometimes not so successful as it might have been, for the
result of it was occasionally a vague irritation, which expressed itself
in hostile criticism of several British institutions. Bessie Alden went
to some entertainments at which she met Lord Lambeth; but she went
to others at which his lordship was neither actually nor potentially
present; and it was chiefly on these latter occasions that she
encountered those literary and artistic celebrities of whom mention has
been made. After a while she reduced the matter to a principle. If Lord
Lambeth should appear anywhere, it was a symbol that there would be no
poets and philosophers; and in consequence--for it was almost a strict
consequence--she used to enumerate to the young man these objects of her
admiration.

“You seem to be awfully fond of those sort of people,” said Lord Lambeth
one day, as if the idea had just occurred to him.

“They are the people in England I am most curious to see,” Bessie Alden
replied.

“I suppose that’s because you have read so much,” said Lord Lambeth
gallantly.

“I have not read so much. It is because we think so much of them at
home.”

“Oh, I see,” observed the young nobleman. “In Boston.”

“Not only in Boston; everywhere,” said Bessie. “We hold them in great
honor; they go to the best dinner parties.”

“I daresay you are right. I can’t say I know many of them.”

“It’s a pity you don’t,” Bessie Alden declared. “It would do you good.”

“I daresay it would,” said Lord Lambeth very humbly. “But I must say I
don’t like the looks of some of them.”

“Neither do I--of some of them. But there are all kinds, and many of
them are charming.”

“I have talked with two or three of them,” the young man went on, “and I
thought they had a kind of fawning manner.”

“Why should they fawn?” Bessie Alden demanded.

“I’m sure I don’t know. Why, indeed?”

“Perhaps you only thought so,” said Bessie.

“Well, of course,” rejoined her companion, “that’s a kind of thing that
can’t be proved.”

“In America they don’t fawn,” said Bessie.

“Ah, well, then, they must be better company.”

Bessie was silent a moment. “That is one of the things I don’t like
about England,” she said; “your keeping the distinguished people apart.”

“How do you mean apart?”

“Why, letting them come only to certain places. You never see them.”

Lord Lambeth looked at her a moment. “What people do you mean?”

“The eminent people--the authors and artists--the clever people.”

“Oh, there are other eminent people besides those,” said Lord Lambeth.

“Well, you certainly keep them apart,” repeated the young girl.

“And there are other clever people,” added Lord Lambeth simply.

Bessie Alden looked at him, and she gave a light laugh. “Not many,” she
said.

On another occasion--just after a dinner party--she told him that there
was something else in England she did not like.

“Oh, I say!” he cried, “haven’t you abused us enough?”

“I have never abused you at all,” said Bessie; “but I don’t like your
PRECEDENCE.”

“It isn’t my precedence!” Lord Lambeth declared, laughing.

“Yes, it is yours--just exactly yours; and I think it’s odious,” said
Bessie.

“I never saw such a young lady for discussing things! Has someone had
the impudence to go before you?” asked his lordship.

“It is not the going before me that I object to,” said Bessie; “it
is their thinking that they have a right to do it--A RIGHT THAT I
RECOGNIZE.”

“I never saw such a young lady as you are for not ‘recognizing.’ I have
no doubt the thing is BEASTLY, but it saves a lot of trouble.”

“It makes a lot of trouble. It’s horrid,” said Bessie.

“But how would you have the first people go?” asked Lord Lambeth. “They
can’t go last.”

“Whom do you mean by the first people?”

“Ah, if you mean to question first principles!” said Lord Lambeth.

“If those are your first principles, no wonder some of your arrangements
are horrid,” observed Bessie Alden with a very pretty ferocity. “I am a
young girl, so of course I go last; but imagine what Kitty must feel on
being informed that she is not at liberty to budge until certain other
ladies have passed out.”

“Oh, I say, she is not ‘informed!’” cried Lord Lambeth. “No one would do
such a thing as that.”

“She is made to feel it,” the young girl insisted--“as if they were
afraid she would make a rush for the door. No; you have a lovely
country,” said Bessie Alden, “but your precedence is horrid.”

“I certainly shouldn’t think your sister would like it,” rejoined Lord
Lambeth with even exaggerated gravity. But Bessie Alden could induce
him to enter no formal protest against this repulsive custom, which he
seemed to think an extreme convenience.

Percy Beaumont all this time had been a very much less frequent visitor
at Jones’s Hotel than his noble kinsman; he had, in fact, called but
twice upon the two American ladies. Lord Lambeth, who often saw him,
reproached him with his neglect and declared that, although Mrs.
Westgate had said nothing about it, he was sure that she was secretly
wounded by it. “She suffers too much to speak,” said Lord Lambeth.

“That’s all gammon,” said Percy Beaumont; “there’s a limit to what
people can suffer!” And, though sending no apologies to Jones’s Hotel,
he undertook in a manner to explain his absence. “You are always there,”
 he said, “and that’s reason enough for my not going.”

“I don’t see why. There is enough for both of us.”

“I don’t care to be a witness of your--your reckless passion,” said
Percy Beaumont.

Lord Lambeth looked at him with a cold eye and for a moment said
nothing. “It’s not so obvious as you might suppose,” he rejoined dryly,
“considering what a demonstrative beggar I am.”

“I don’t want to know anything about it--nothing whatever,” said
Beaumont. “Your mother asks me everytime she sees me whether I believe
you are really lost--and Lady Pimlico does the same. I prefer to be able
to answer that I know nothing about it--that I never go there. I stay
away for consistency’s sake. As I said the other day, they must look
after you themselves.”

“You are devilish considerate,” said Lord Lambeth. “They never question
me.”

“They are afraid of you. They are afraid of irritating you and making
you worse. So they go to work very cautiously, and, somewhere or other,
they get their information. They know a great deal about you. They
know that you have been with those ladies to the dome of St. Paul’s
and--where was the other place?--to the Thames Tunnel.”

“If all their knowledge is as accurate as that, it must be very
valuable,” said Lord Lambeth.

“Well, at any rate, they know that you have been visiting the ‘sights
of the metropolis.’ They think--very naturally, as it seems to me--that
when you take to visiting the sights of the metropolis with a little
American girl, there is serious cause for alarm.” Lord Lambeth responded
to this intimation by scornful laughter, and his companion continued,
after a pause: “I said just now I didn’t want to know anything about
the affair; but I will confess that I am curious to learn whether you
propose to marry Miss Bessie Alden.”

On this point Lord Lambeth gave his interlocutor no immediate
satisfaction; he was musing, with a frown. “By Jove,” he said, “they go
rather too far. They SHALL find me dangerous--I promise them.”

Percy Beaumont began to laugh. “You don’t redeem your promises. You said
the other day you would make your mother call.”

Lord Lambeth continued to meditate. “I asked her to call,” he said
simply.

“And she declined?”

“Yes; but she shall do it yet.”

“Upon my word,” said Percy Beaumont, “if she gets much more frightened I
believe she will.” Lord Lambeth looked at him, and he went on. “She will
go to the girl herself.”

“How do you mean she will go to her?”

“She will beg her off, or she will bribe her. She will take strong
measures.”

Lord Lambeth turned away in silence, and his companion watched him take
twenty steps and then slowly return. “I have invited Mrs. Westgate and
Miss Alden to Branches,” he said, “and this evening I shall name a day.”

“And shall you invite your mother and your sisters to meet them?”

“Explicitly!”

“That will set the duchess off,” said Percy Beaumont. “I suspect she
will come.”

“She may do as she pleases.”

Beaumont looked at Lord Lambeth. “You do really propose to marry the
little sister, then?”

“I like the way you talk about it!” cried the young man. “She won’t
gobble me down; don’t be afraid.”

“She won’t leave you on your knees,” said Percy Beaumont. “What IS the
inducement?”

“You talk about proposing: wait till I HAVE proposed,” Lord Lambeth went
on.

“That’s right, my dear fellow; think about it,” said Percy Beaumont.

“She’s a charming girl,” pursued his lordship.

“Of course she’s a charming girl. I don’t know a girl more charming,
intrinsically. But there are other charming girls nearer home.”

“I like her spirit,” observed Lord Lambeth, almost as if he were trying
to torment his cousin.

“What’s the peculiarity of her spirit?”

“She’s not afraid, and she says things out, and she thinks herself as
good as anyone. She is the only girl I have ever seen that was not dying
to marry me.”

“How do you know that, if you haven’t asked her?”

“I don’t know how; but I know it.”

“I am sure she asked me questions enough about your property and your
titles,” said Beaumont.

“She has asked me questions, too; no end of them,” Lord Lambeth
admitted. “But she asked for information, don’t you know.”

“Information? Aye, I’ll warrant she wanted it. Depend upon it that she
is dying to marry you just as much and just as little as all the rest of
them.”

“I shouldn’t like her to refuse me--I shouldn’t like that.”

“If the thing would be so disagreeable, then, both to you and to her, in
Heaven’s name leave it alone,” said Percy Beaumont.

Mrs. Westgate, on her side, had plenty to say to her sister about the
rarity of Mr. Beaumont’s visits and the nonappearance of the Duchess of
Bayswater. She professed, however, to derive more satisfaction from
this latter circumstance than she could have done from the most lavish
attentions on the part of this great lady. “It is most marked,” she
said--“most marked. It is a delicious proof that we have made them
miserable. The day we dined with Lord Lambeth I was really sorry for the
poor fellow.” It will have been gathered that the entertainment offered
by Lord Lambeth to his American friends had not been graced by the
presence of his anxious mother. He had invited several choice spirits
to meet them; but the ladies of his immediate family were to Mrs.
Westgate’s sense--a sense possibly morbidly acute--conspicuous by their
absence.

“I don’t want to express myself in a manner that you dislike,” said
Bessie Alden; “but I don’t know why you should have so many theories
about Lord Lambeth’s poor mother. You know a great many young men in New
York without knowing their mothers.”

Mrs. Westgate looked at her sister and then turned away. “My dear
Bessie, you are superb!” she said.

“One thing is certain,” the young girl continued. “If I believed I were
a cause of annoyance--however unwitting--to Lord Lambeth’s family, I
should insist--”

“Insist upon my leaving England,” said Mrs. Westgate.

“No, not that. I want to go to the National Gallery again; I want to see
Stratford-on-Avon and Canterbury Cathedral. But I should insist upon his
coming to see us no more.”

“That would be very modest and very pretty of you; but you wouldn’t do
it now.”

“Why do you say ‘now’?” asked Bessie Alden. “Have I ceased to be
modest?”

“You care for him too much. A month ago, when you said you didn’t, I
believe it was quite true. But at present, my dear child,” said Mrs.
Westgate, “you wouldn’t find it quite so simple a matter never to see
Lord Lambeth again. I have seen it coming on.”

“You are mistaken,” said Bessie. “You don’t understand.”

“My dear child, don’t be perverse,” rejoined her sister.

“I know him better, certainly, if you mean that,” said Bessie. “And I
like him very much. But I don’t like him enough to make trouble for him
with his family. However, I don’t believe in that.”

“I like the way you say ‘however,’” Mrs. Westgate exclaimed. “Come; you
would not marry him?”

“Oh, no,” said the young girl.

Mrs. Westgate for a moment seemed vexed. “Why not, pray?” she demanded.

“Because I don’t care to,” said Bessie Alden.

The morning after Lord Lambeth had had, with Percy Beaumont, that
exchange of ideas which has just been narrated, the ladies at Jones’s
Hotel received from his lordship a written invitation to pay their
projected visit to Branches Castle on the following Tuesday. “I think I
have made up a very pleasant party,” the young nobleman said. “Several
people whom you know, and my mother and sisters, who have so long been
regrettably prevented from making your acquaintance.” Bessie Alden lost
no time in calling her sister’s attention to the injustice she had done
the Duchess of Bayswater, whose hostility was now proved to be a vain
illusion.

“Wait till you see if she comes,” said Mrs. Westgate. “And if she is to
meet us at her son’s house the obligation was all the greater for her to
call upon us.”

Bessie had not to wait long, and it appeared that Lord Lambeth’s mother
now accepted Mrs. Westgate’s view of her duties. On the morrow, early in
the afternoon, two cards were brought to the apartment of the American
ladies--one of them bearing the name of the Duchess of Bayswater and
the other that of the Countess of Pimlico. Mrs. Westgate glanced at the
clock. “It is not yet four,” she said; “they have come early; they wish
to see us. We will receive them.” And she gave orders that her visitors
should be admitted. A few moments later they were introduced, and there
was a solemn exchange of amenities. The duchess was a large lady, with a
fine fresh color; the Countess of Pimlico was very pretty and elegant.

The duchess looked about her as she sat down--looked not especially at
Mrs. Westgate. “I daresay my son has told you that I have been wanting
to come and see you,” she observed.

“You are very kind,” said Mrs. Westgate, vaguely--her conscience not
allowing her to assent to this proposition--and, indeed, not permitting
her to enunciate her own with any appreciable emphasis.

“He says you were so kind to him in America,” said the duchess.

“We are very glad,” Mrs. Westgate replied, “to have been able to make
him a little more--a little less--a little more comfortable.”

“I think he stayed at your house,” remarked the Duchess of Bayswater,
looking at Bessie Alden.

“A very short time,” said Mrs. Westgate.

“Oh!” said the duchess; and she continued to look at Bessie, who was
engaged in conversation with her daughter.

“Do you like London?” Lady Pimlico had asked of Bessie, after looking at
her a good deal--at her face and her hands, her dress and her hair.

“Very much indeed,” said Bessie.

“Do you like this hotel?”

“It is very comfortable,” said Bessie.

“Do you like stopping at hotels?” inquired Lady Pimlico after a pause.

“I am very fond of traveling,” Bessie answered, “and I suppose hotels
are a necessary part of it. But they are not the part I am fondest of.”

“Oh, I hate traveling,” said the Countess of Pimlico and transferred her
attention to Mrs. Westgate.

“My son tells me you are going to Branches,” the duchess presently
resumed.

“Lord Lambeth has been so good as to ask us,” said Mrs. Westgate, who
perceived that her visitor had now begun to look at her, and who had her
customary happy consciousness of a distinguished appearance. The only
mitigation of her felicity on this point was that, having inspected her
visitor’s own costume, she said to herself, “She won’t know how well I
am dressed!”

“He has asked me to go, but I am not sure I shall be able,” murmured the
duchess.

“He had offered us the p--prospect of meeting you,” said Mrs. Westgate.

“I hate the country at this season,” responded the duchess.

Mrs. Westgate gave a little shrug. “I think it is pleasanter than
London.”

But the duchess’s eyes were absent again; she was looking very fixedly
at Bessie. In a moment she slowly rose, walked to a chair that stood
empty at the young girl’s right hand, and silently seated herself.
As she was a majestic, voluminous woman, this little transaction had,
inevitably, an air of somewhat impressive intention. It diffused a
certain awkwardness, which Lady Pimlico, as a sympathetic daughter,
perhaps desired to rectify in turning to Mrs. Westgate.

“I daresay you go out a great deal,” she observed.

“No, very little. We are strangers, and we didn’t come here for
society.”

“I see,” said Lady Pimlico. “It’s rather nice in town just now.”

“It’s charming,” said Mrs. Westgate. “But we only go to see a few
people--whom we like.”

“Of course one can’t like everyone,” said Lady Pimlico.

“It depends upon one’s society,” Mrs. Westgate rejoined.

The Duchess meanwhile had addressed herself to Bessie. “My son tells me
the young ladies in America are so clever.”

“I am glad they made so good an impression on him,” said Bessie,
smiling.

The Duchess was not smiling; her large fresh face was very tranquil.
“He is very susceptible,” she said. “He thinks everyone clever, and
sometimes they are.”

“Sometimes,” Bessie assented, smiling still.

The duchess looked at her a little and then went on; “Lambeth is very
susceptible, but he is very volatile, too.”

“Volatile?” asked Bessie.

“He is very inconstant. It won’t do to depend on him.”

“Ah,” said Bessie, “I don’t recognize that description. We have depended
on him greatly--my sister and I--and he has never disappointed us.”

“He will disappoint you yet,” said the duchess.

Bessie gave a little laugh, as if she were amused at the duchess’s
persistency. “I suppose it will depend on what we expect of him.”

“The less you expect, the better,” Lord Lambeth’s mother declared.

“Well,” said Bessie, “we expect nothing unreasonable.”

The duchess for a moment was silent, though she appeared to have more to
say. “Lambeth says he has seen so much of you,” she presently began.

“He has been to see us very often; he has been very kind,” said Bessie
Alden.

“I daresay you are used to that. I am told there is a great deal of that
in America.”

“A great deal of kindness?” the young girl inquired, smiling.

“Is that what you call it? I know you have different expressions.”

“We certainly don’t always understand each other,” said Mrs. Westgate,
the termination of whose interview with Lady Pimlico allowed her to give
her attention to their elder visitor.

“I am speaking of the young men calling so much upon the young ladies,”
 the duchess explained.

“But surely in England,” said Mrs. Westgate, “the young ladies don’t
call upon the young men?”

“Some of them do--almost!” Lady Pimlico declared. “When the young men
are a great PARTI.”

“Bessie, you must make a note of that,” said Mrs. Westgate. “My sister,”
 she added, “is a model traveler. She writes down all the curious facts
she hears in a little book she keeps for the purpose.”

The duchess was a little flushed; she looked all about the room, while
her daughter turned to Bessie. “My brother told us you were wonderfully
clever,” said Lady Pimlico.

“He should have said my sister,” Bessie answered--“when she says such
things as that.”

“Shall you be long at Branches?” the duchess asked, abruptly, of the
young girl.

“Lord Lambeth has asked us for three days,” said Bessie.

“I shall go,” the duchess declared, “and my daughter, too.”

“That will be charming!” Bessie rejoined.

“Delightful!” murmured Mrs. Westgate.

“I shall expect to see a great deal of you,” the duchess continued.
“When I go to Branches I monopolize my son’s guests.”

“They must be most happy,” said Mrs. Westgate very graciously.

“I want immensely to see it--to see the castle,” said Bessie to the
duchess. “I have never seen one--in England, at least; and you know we
have none in America.”

“Ah, you are fond of castles?” inquired her Grace.

“Immensely!” replied the young girl. “It has been the dream of my life
to live in one.”

The duchess looked at her a moment, as if she hardly knew how to take
this assurance, which, from her Grace’s point of view, was either very
artless or very audacious. “Well,” she said, rising, “I will show
you Branches myself.” And upon this the two great ladies took their
departure.

“What did they mean by it?” asked Mrs. Westgate, when they were gone.

“They meant to be polite,” said Bessie, “because we are going to meet
them.”

“It is too late to be polite,” Mrs. Westgate replied almost grimly.
“They meant to overawe us by their fine manners and their grandeur, and
to make you LACHER PRISE.”

“LACHER PRISE? What strange things you say!” murmured Bessie Alden.

“They meant to snub us, so that we shouldn’t dare to go to Branches,”
 Mrs. Westgate continued.

“On the contrary,” said Bessie, “the duchess offered to show me the
place herself.”

“Yes, you may depend upon it she won’t let you out of her sight. She
will show you the place from morning till night.”

“You have a theory for everything,” said Bessie.

“And you apparently have none for anything.”

“I saw no attempt to ‘overawe’ us,” said the young girl. “Their manners
were not fine.”

“They were not even good!” Mrs. Westgate declared.

Bessie was silent a while, but in a few moments she observed that she
had a very good theory. “They came to look at me,” she said, as if this
had been a very ingenious hypothesis. Mrs. Westgate did it justice;
she greeted it with a smile and pronounced it most brilliant, while, in
reality, she felt that the young girl’s skepticism, or her charity, or,
as she had sometimes called it appropriately, her idealism, was proof
against irony. Bessie, however, remained meditative all the rest of that
day and well on into the morrow.

On the morrow, before lunch, Mrs. Westgate had occasion to go out for an
hour, and left her sister writing a letter. When she came back she
met Lord Lambeth at the door of the hotel, coming away. She thought he
looked slightly embarrassed; he was certainly very grave. “I am sorry to
have missed you. Won’t you come back?” she asked.

“No,” said the young man, “I can’t. I have seen your sister. I can never
come back.” Then he looked at her a moment and took her hand. “Goodbye,
Mrs. Westgate,” he said. “You have been very kind to me.” And with what
she thought a strange, sad look in his handsome young face, he turned
away.

She went in, and she found Bessie still writing her letter; that is,
Mrs. Westgate perceived she was sitting at the table with the pen in her
hand and not writing. “Lord Lambeth has been here,” said the elder lady
at last.

Then Bessie got up and showed her a pale, serious face. She bent this
face upon her sister for some time, confessing silently and a little
pleading. “I told him,” she said at last, “that we could not go to
Branches.”

Mrs. Westgate displayed just a spark of irritation. “He might have
waited,” she said with a smile, “till one had seen the castle.” Later,
an hour afterward, she said, “Dear Bessie, I wish you might have
accepted him.”

“I couldn’t,” said Bessie gently.

“He is an excellent fellow,” said Mrs. Westgate.

“I couldn’t,” Bessie repeated.

“If it is only,” her sister added, “because those women will think that
they succeeded--that they paralyzed us!”

Bessie Alden turned away; but presently she added, “They were
interesting; I should have liked to see them again.”

“So should I!” cried Mrs. Westgate significantly.

“And I should have liked to see the castle,” said Bessie. “But now we
must leave England,” she added.

Her sister looked at her. “You will not wait to go to the National
Gallery?”

“Not now.”

“Nor to Canterbury Cathedral?”

Bessie reflected a moment. “We can stop there on our way to Paris,” she
said.

Lord Lambeth did not tell Percy Beaumont that the contingency he was
not prepared at all to like had occurred; but Percy Beaumont, on hearing
that the two ladies had left London, wondered with some intensity what
had happened; wondered, that is, until the Duchess of Bayswater came
a little to his assistance. The two ladies went to Paris, and Mrs.
Westgate beguiled the journey to that city by repeating several
times--“That’s what I regret; they will think they petrified us.” But
Bessie Alden seemed to regret nothing.





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