season of belledom in being whirled from
festivity to festivity, in dancing in rooms festooned with thousands of
dollars' worth of flowers, in lunching or dining at tables loaded with
roses and violets and orchids, from which ballrooms or feasts she had
borne away wonderful "favours" and gifts, whose prices, being recorded
in the newspapers, caused a thrill of delight or envy to pass over the
land. She was a slim little creature, with quantities of light feathery
hair like a French doll's. She had small hands and small feet and a
small waist--a small brain also, it must be admitted, but she was an
innocent, sweet-tempered girl with a childlike simpleness of mind.
In fine, she was exactly the girl to find Sir Nigel's domineering
temperament at once imposing and attractive, so long as it was cloaked
by the ceremonies of external good breeding.

Her sister Bettina, who was still a child, was of a stronger and less
susceptible nature. Betty--at eight--had long legs and a square but
delicate small face. Her well-opened steel-blue eyes were noticeable
for rather extravagant ink-black lashes and a straight young stare
which seemed to accuse if not to condemn. She was being educated at
a ruinously expensive school with a number of other inordinately rich
little girls, who were all too wonderfully dressed and too lavishly
supplied with pocket money. The school considered itself especially
refined and select, but was in fact interestingly vulgar.

The inordinately rich little girls, who had most of them pretty and
spiritual or pretty and piquant faces, ate a great many bon bons and
chattered a great deal in high unmodulated voices about the parties
their sisters and other relatives went to and the dresses they wore.
Some of them were nice little souls, who in the future would emerge from
their chrysalis state enchanting women, but they used colloquialisms
freely, and had an ingenuous habit of referring to the prices of
things. Bettina Vanderpoel, who was the richest and cleverest and most
promisingly handsome among them, was colloquial to slanginess, but she
had a deep, mellow, child voice and an amazing carriage.

She could not endure Sir Nigel Anstruthers, and, being an American
child, did not hesitate to express herself with force, if with some
crudeness. "He's a hateful thing," she said, "I loathe him. He's stuck
up and he thinks you are afraid of him and he likes it."

Sir Nigel had known only English children, little gir