Betty seems to be going in for politics," he said after reading the
letter containing her request and her first list of books. "She's about
as mad as she can be at the ignorance of the French girls about America
and Americans. She wants to fill up on solid facts, so that she can come
out strong in argument. She's got an understanding of the power of solid
facts that would be a fortune to her if she were a man."

It was no doubt her understanding of the power of facts which led her
to learn everything well and to develop in many directions. She began to
dip into political and historical volumes because she was furious, and
wished to be able to refute idiocy, but she found herself continuing to
read because she was interested in a way she had not expected. She began
to see things. Once she made a remark which was prophetic. She made
it in answer to a guileless observation concerning the gold mines with
which Boston was supposed to be enriched.

"You don't know anything about America, you others," she said. "But you
WILL know!"

"Do you think it will become the fashion to travel in America?" asked a
German girl.

"Perhaps," said Betty. "But--it isn't so much that you will go to
America. I believe it will come to you. It's like that--America. It
doesn't stand still. It goes and gets what it wants."

She laughed as she ended, and so did the other girls. But in ten years'
time, when they were young women, some of them married, some of them
court beauties, one of them recalled this speech to another, whom she
encountered in an important house in St. Petersburg, the wife of the
celebrated diplomat who was its owner being an American woman.

Bettina Vanderpoel's education was a rather fine thing. She herself
had more to do with it than girls usually have to do with their own
training. In a few months' time those in authority in the French school
found that it was not necessary to supervise and expurgate her. She
learned with an interested rapacity which was at once unusual and
amazing. And she evidently did not learn from books alone. Her voice, as
an organ, had been musical and full from babyhood. It began to modulate
itself and to express things most voices are incapable of expressing.
She had been so built by nature that the carriage of her head and limbs
was good to behold. She acquired a harmony of movement which caused her
to lose no shade of grace and spirit. Her eyes were full of thought, of
speculation, and intent