st.
"Mais, n'importe. My niece refused him. That meant--I've never confessed
it to any one before--I've been too proud--but I want you to
understand--it meant my defeat--my final defeat. I hadn't the courage to
begin again. C'etait le desastre. C'etait Sedan."

"Oh, madame!"

It seemed to him that her mouth worked with an odd piteousness; and
before going on she put up a crooked little jeweled hand and dashed away
a tear.

"It would have been everything to me. It would have put me where I
belong, in the place I've been trying to reach all these years. The life
of an American woman in Europe, monsieur, can be very cruel. We've
nothing to back us up, and everything to fight against in front. It's
all push, and little headway. They don't want us. That's the plain
English of it. They can't imagine why we leave our own country and come
over here. They're so narrow. They're selfish, too. Everything they've
got they want to keep for themselves. They marry us--the Lord only knows
why!--and nine times out of ten all we get for it is the knowledge that
we've been bamboozled out of our own _dots_. There was Rene de
Lonchartres who married that goose Annie Armstrong. They ridiculed her
when she came over here, and at the same time clapped him on the back
for having got her. That's as true as you live. It's their way. They
would have ridiculed me, too, if I hadn't been determined years ago to
beat them on their own ground. I could have done it, too, if--"

"If it had been worth while," he ventured.

"You know nothing about it. I could have done it if my niece had put out
just one little finger--when I'd got everything ready for her to do it.
Yes, I'd got everything ready--and yet she refused him. She refused him
after I'd seen them all--his mother, his sisters, his two uncles--one of
them in waiting on the Duc d'Orleans--Philippe V., as we call him--all
of them the purest old noblesse d'epee in Normandy."

Her agitation expressed itself again in little dartings to and fro. "I
went begging to them, as you might say. I took all their snubs--and oh!
so fine some of them were!--more delicate than the point of a needle! I
took them because I could see just how I should pay them back. I needn't
explain to you how that would be, because you couldn't understand. It
would be out of the question for an American."

"I don't think we _are_ good at returning snubs, madame. That's a fact."

"You're not good at anything but making money;