Her views about America and about her own place in the world seemed
equally fresh and original to Sir Richmond.

"I realize I've got to be a responsible American citizen," she had said.
That didn't mean that she attached very much importance to her recently
acquired vote. She evidently classified voters into the irresponsible
who just had votes and the responsible who also had a considerable
amount of property as well. She had no illusions about the power of the
former class. It didn't exist. They were steered to their decisions by
people employed, directed or stimulated by "father" and his friends and
associates, the owners of America, the real "responsible citizens." Or
they fell a prey to the merely adventurous leading of "revolutionaries."
But anyhow they were steered. She herself, it was clear, was bound
to become a very responsible citizen indeed. She would some day, she
laughed, be swimming in oil and such like property. Her interest in
Sir Richmond's schemes for a scientific world management of fuel was
therefore, she realized, a very direct one. But it was remarkable to
find a young woman seeing it like that.

Father it seemed varied very much in his attitude towards her. He
despised and distrusted women generally, and it was evident he had made
it quite clear to her how grave an error it was on her part to persist
in being a daughter and not a son. At moments it seemed to Sir
Richmond that she was disposed to agree with father upon that. When Mr.
Grammont's sense of her regrettable femininity was uppermost, then he
gave his intelligence chiefly to schemes for tying her up against the
machinations of adventurers by means of trustees, partners, lawyers,
advisers, agreements and suchlike complications, or for acquiring a
workable son by marriage. To this last idea it would seem the importance
in her life of the rather heavily named Gunter Lake was to be ascribed.
But another mood of the old man's was distrust of anything that could
not be spoken of as his "own flesh and blood," and then he would direct
his attention to a kind of masculinization of his daughter and to
schemes for giving her the completest control of all he had to leave her
provided she never married nor fell under masculine sway. "After all,"
he would reflect as he hesitated over the practicability of his life's
ideal, "there was Hetty Green."

This latter idea had reft her suddenly at the age of seventeen from
the educational care of an Engli