a explained. "If Aunt Vic had meant to
write she would have done it long ago. I'm afraid I've offended her past
forgiveness."

She held her head slightly to one side, smiling with an air of mock
penitence.

"Dear, dear!" Mrs. Temple murmured, sympathetically. "Just because you
wouldn't marry a Frenchman!"

"And a little because I'm _going_ to marry an Englishman. To Aunt Vic
all Englishmen are grocers."

"Horrid old thing!" Drusilla said, indignantly.

"It's because she doesn't know them, of course," Olivia went on. "It's
one of the things I never can understand--how people can generalize
about a whole nation because they happen to dislike one or two
individuals. As a matter of fact, Aunt Vic has become so absorbed in her
little circle of old French royalist noblesse that she can't see
anything to admire outside the rue de l'Universite and chateau life in
Normandy. She does admit that there's an element of homespun virtue in
the old families of Boston and Waverton; but that's only because she
belongs to them herself."

"The capacity of the American woman for being domesticated in an alien
environment," observed Rodney Temple, "is only equaled by the dog's."

"We're nomadic, father," Drusilla asserted, "and migratory. We've always
been so. It's because we're Saxons and Angles and Celts and Normans,
and--"

"Saxon and Norman and Dane are we," Mrs. Temple quoted, gently.

"They've always been fidgeting about the world, from one country to
another," Drusilla continued, "and we've inherited the taste. If we
hadn't, our ancestors would never have crossed the Atlantic, in the
first place. And now that we've got here, and can't go any farther in
this direction, we're on the jump to get back again. That's all there is
to it. It's just in the blood. Isn't it, Peter? Isn't it, Cousin Henry?"

Drusilla had a way of appealing to whatever men were present, as though
her statements lacked something till they had received masculine
corroboration.

"All the same, I wish you could have managed the thing without giving
offence to Aunt Vic."

The words were Henry Guion's first since sitting down to table.

"I couldn't help it, papa. I didn't _give_ Aunt Vic offence; she took
it."

"She's always been so fond of you--"

"I'm fond of _her_. She's an old darling. And yet I couldn't let her
marry me off to a Frenchman, in the French way, when I'd made up my mind
to--to do something else. Could I, Cousin Cherry?"

Mrs. Temp