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e is so much truth in it." The people walking in the sunshine were all full of spring thoughts and plans. The colours they wore, the flowers in the women's hats and the men's buttonholes belonged to the season. The cheerful crowds of people and carriages had a sort of rushing stir of movement which suggested freshness. Later in the year everything looks more tired. Now things were beginning and everyone was rather inclined to believe that this year would be better than last. "Look at the shop windows," said Betty, "full of whites and pinks and yellows and blues--the colours of hyacinth and daffodil beds. It seems as if they insist that there never has been a winter and never will be one. They insist that there never was and never will be anything but spring." "It's in the air." Lady Anstruthers' sigh was actually a happy one. "It is just what I used to feel in April when we drove down Fifth Avenue." Among the crowds of freshly-dressed passers-by, women with flowery hats and light frocks and parasols, men with touches of flower-colour on the lapels of their coats, and the holiday look in their faces, she noted so many of a familiar type that she began to look for and try to pick them out with quite excited interest. "I believe that woman is an American," she would say. "That girl looks as if she were a New Yorker," again. "That man's face looks as if it belonged to Broadway. Oh, Betty! do you think I am right? I should say those girls getting out of the hansom to go into Burnham & Staples' came from out West and are going to buy thousands of things. Don't they look like it?" She began to lean forward and look on at things with an interest so unlike her Stornham listlessness that Betty's heart was moved. Her face looked alive, and little waves of colour rose under her skin. Several times she laughed the natural little laugh of her girlhood which it had seemed almost too much to expect to hear again. The first of these laughs came when she counted her tenth American, a tall Westerner of the cartoon type, sauntering along with an expression of speculative enjoyment on his odd face, and evidently, though furtively, chewing tobacco. "I absolutely love him, Betty," she cried. "You couldn't mistake him for anything else." "No," answered Betty, feeling that she loved him herself, "not if you found him embalmed in the Pyramids." They pleased themselves immensely, trying to guess what he would buy and take home t
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