“I don’t expect any now,” Olivia 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. Temple plumed herself, pleased at being appealed to.  “I don’t see how you could, dear.  But I suppose your dear aunt—­great-aunt, that is—­has become so foreign that she’s forgotten our simple ways.  So long as you follow your heart, dear—­”

“I’ve done that, Cousin Cherry.”