For a few days longer she staid at the “George,” and astonished the guests with the richness of her toilets and the singularity of her speech, which was something wonderful to her hearers, who looked upon her as a specimen of Americans generally.  But this she would not permit; and once, when she overheard the remark, “that’s a fair sample of them, I suppose,” turned fiercely on the knot of ladies who, she knew, were discussing her, and said: 

“If it’s me you are talking up and think a fair sample let me tell you that you are much mistaken.  I ain’t a sample of nothin’.  I am just myself, and Uncle Sam is not at all responsible for me, unless it is that he didn’t give me a chance, when young, to go to school.  I was poor, and had to work for my livin’, and my old blind mother’s, too.  She is dead this many a year; but if she could of lived till now, when I have so much more than I know what to do with, I’d have dressed her up in silks and satins, and brought her over the seas and flouted her in your faces as another sample of your American cousins, who, take ’em by and large, are quite as refined as your English women, and enough sight better informed about everything.  Why, only t’other day one of ’em asked me what language was generally spoken in New York city, and didn’t a school-girl from Edinburgh ask Gusty if the people out West were not all heathens, and if Chicago was near Boston!  I tell you, ladies, folks who live in glass houses should not throw stones.  You are well enough, and nice enough, and on voices you beat us all holler, for ’tis a fact that most of us pitch ours too high and talk through our noses awful, and maybe you’d do that too, if you lived in our beastly climate, but as a rule you have not an atom more learning or refinement at heart than we.”

Thus speaking, she sailed from the room with an air which would have befitted a grand duchess, leaving her astonished auditors to look at each other a moment in silence, and then to express themselves fully and freely and unreservedly with regard to American effrontery, American manners, and American slang, as represented by Mrs. Rossiter-Browne.

It was a day or two after this that the French tea was served in the Stoneleigh garden, with strawberries and cream and sponge cakes, and Daisy did the honors as hostess admirably, and Mrs. Rossiter-Browne, resplendent in garnet satin and diamonds, sat in a covered garden-chair and noted everything with a view to repeat it sometime in the garden of her country house at home.  “She’d show ’em what was what,” she thought.  “She’d Let ’em know that she had traveled and had been invited out among the gentry,” for such she believed Daisy to be, and she anticipated with a great deal of complacency the sensation which that airy, graceful, woman would create in Ridgeville, the little place a mile or more from Allington, where her husband’s farm was situated, and where stood the once old-fashioned house, but now very pretentious