lucrative interest
in the Winnebago paper mills and invested great sums in French stocks,
in Russian enterprises, in German shares.

She liked to be mistaken for a French woman.

She and Gideon spoke the language like natives--or nearly.

She was vain of Gideon's un-American looks, and cross with him when, on
their rare and brief visits to New York, he insisted that he liked
American tailoring and American-made shoes. Once or twice, soon after
his father's death, he had said, casually, "You didn't like Winnebago,
did you? Living in it, I mean."

"_Like_ it!"

"Well, these English, I mean, and French--they sort of grow up in a
place, and stay with it and belong to it, see what I mean? and it gives
you a kind of permanent feeling. Not patriotic, exactly, but solid and
native heathy and Scots-wha-hae-wi'-Wallace and all that kind of slop."

"Giddy darling, don't be silly."

Occasionally, too, he said, "Look here, Julia"--she liked this modern
method of address--"look here, Julia, I ought to be getting busy. Doing
something. Here I am, nineteen, and I can't do a thing except dance
pretty well, but not as well as that South American eel we met last
week; mix a cocktail pretty well, but not as good a one as Benny the
bartender turns out at Voyot's; ride pretty well, but not as well as the
English chaps; drive a car----"

She interrupted him there. "Drive a car better than even an Italian
chauffeur. Had you there, Giddy darling."

She undoubtedly had Giddy darling there. His driving was little short of
miraculous, and his feeling for the intricate inside of a motor engine
was as delicate and unerring as that of a professional pianist for his
pet pianoforte. They motored a good deal, with France as a permanent
background and all Europe as a playground. They flitted about the
continent, a whirl of glittering blue-and-cream enamel, tan leather
coating, fur robes, air cushions, gold-topped flasks, and petrol. Giddy
knew Como and Villa D'Este as the place where that pretty Hungarian
widow had borrowed a thousand lires from him at the Casino roulette
table and never paid him back; London as a pleasing potpourri of briar
pipes, smart leather gloves, music-hall revues, and night clubs; Berlin
as a rather stuffy hole where they tried to ape Paris and failed, but
you had to hand it to Charlotte when it came to the skating at the Eis
Palast. A pleasing existence, but unprofitable. No one saw the cloud
gathering because of clou