ssing sea and land to get whatever
was good to have the voyage back was nothing, especially in the days of
easy money and steam. The Guions had been among the first to make it.
They had been among the first Americans to descend on the shores of
Europe with the intention--more or less obscure, more or less
acknowledged, as the case might be--of acquiring and enjoying the
treasures of tradition by association or alliance or any other means
that might present themselves. Richard Guion, grandfather of Henry
Guion, found the way to cut a dash in the Paris of the early Second
Empire and to marry his daughter, Victoria Guion, to the Marquis de
Melcourt. From the simple American point of view of that day and date it
was a dazzling match, long talked of by the naive press of New York,
Boston, and Philadelphia.

By the more ambitious members of the Guion house it was considered as
the beginning of a glorious epoch; but, looking back now, Olivia could
see how meager the results had been. Since those days a brilliant
American society had sprung up on the English stem, like a mistletoe on
an oak; but, while Henry and Charlotta Guion would gladly have struck
their roots into that sturdy trunk, they lacked the money essential to
parasitic growth. As for Victoria Guion, French life, especially the old
royalist phase of it, which offers no crevices on its creaseless bark in
which a foreign seed can germinate, absorbed her within its tough old
blossom as a pitcher-plant sucks in a fly. Henceforth the utmost she
could do for her kith and kin was to force open the trap from time to
time, so that Olivia, if she liked, could be swallowed, too. In that
task the old lady was not only industrious but generous, offering to
subscribe handsomely toward the _dot_, as well as giving it to be
understood that the bride-elect would figure in the end as her residuary
legatee. Owing to this prospect Olivia had been compelled to decline a
comte and a vicomte of crusading ancestry, procured at some pains by
Madame de Melcourt; but when she also refused the eminently eligible Duc
de Berteuil, whose terms in the way of dowry were reasonable, while he
offered her a splendidly historic name and background, the Marquise not
unnaturally lost her temper and declared that she washed her hands of
her grandniece once for all.

Not till this minute had Olivia ever considered that this reluctance on
her part to be "well established" must have been something like a gr