t preceding
it, but she could not ignore the fact that the value he set on
things--in morals, society, or art--depended on their power to strike
the eye. She had smiled at that, as at something which, after all, was
harmless. She had smiled, too, when he offered to himself--and to her
also, it had to be admitted--the best of whatever could be had, since,
presumably, he could afford it; though, as far as she was concerned, she
would have been happier with simpler standards and a less ambitious mode
of life. In following the path her parents had marked out for her, and
to some extent beaten in advance, she had acquiesced in their plans
rather than developed wishes of her own. Having grown tired of her
annual round of American and English country-houses, with interludes for
Paris, Biarritz, or Cannes, she had gone on chiefly because, as far as
she could see, there was nothing else to do.

Looking at him now, it came over her for the first time that she must be
a disappointment to him. He had never given her reason to suspect it,
and yet it must be so. First among the aims for which he had been
striving, and to attain to which he had hazarded so much, there must
have been the hope that she should make a brilliant match. That, and
that alone, would have given them as a family the sure international
position he had coveted, and which plenty of other Americans were
successful in securing.

It was only of late years, with the growth of her own independent social
judgment, that she could look back over the past and see the Guions as
in the van of that movement of the New World back upon the Old of which
the force was forever augmenting. As Drusilla Fane was fond of saying,
it was a manifestation of the nomadic, or perhaps the predatory, spirit
characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. It was part of that impulse
to expand, annex, appropriate, which had urged the Angles to descend on
the shores of Kent and the Normans to cross from Dives to Hastings.
Later, it had driven their descendants over the Atlantic, as
individuals, as households, or as "churches"; and now, from their rich,
comfortable, commonplace homes in New England, Illinois, or California,
it bade later descendants still lift up their eyes and see how much
there was to be desired in the lands their ancestors had left
behind--fair parks, stately manors, picturesque chateaux, sonorous
titles, and varied, dignified ways of living.

To a people with the habit of compa