With that she continued her course up stairs, and we descended to the porte-cochere.

She was a faded woman, “dressed to death,” as Amy phrased it, and none of my people had a good word for her.

“The Leares are rolling in riches, I believe,” remarked my father, “and an American who is rich has no hereditary obligations to absorb his wealth, so that it becomes all ‘spending-money,’ as Miss Hermione says.  The head of the family—­King Leare I call him—­stays at home in some sort of a counting-room in New York and makes money, giving Mrs. Leare and Miss Hermione carte blanche to spend it on any follies they please.  I never heard anything exactly wrong concerning Mrs. Leare, but she does not seem to me the woman to be trusted with that very nice young daughter.  I feel great pity for Miss Leare.”

“Miss Leare has plenty of sense and character,” said my mother:  “I do not think her mother’s queer surroundings seem to affect her in any way.  She moves among the Frenchmen, Poles and Italians of her mother’s court like that lady Shakespeare—­or was it Spenser?—­wrote about among the fauns and satyrs.  With all her American freedom she avoids improprieties by instinct.  I have no fears for her future if she marries the right man.”

“Indeed, mamma,” said Amy, “I wish she would keep more strictly within the limit of the proprieties.  She makes me nervous all the time we are together.”

“My dear, you never heard her breathe a really unbecoming word or saw her do an immodest thing?” said my mother interrogatively.

“Oh no, of course not,” said Amy.

“They say Mrs. Leare wants to marry her to that Neapolitan marquis who is so often there,” put in Ellen. “On dit, she will have a dot of two millions of francs, or, as they call it, half a million of dollars.”

“Such a rumor,” I broke in, rather annoyed by this turn in the conversation, “may well buy her the right to be a marchioness if she will.”

“Indeed it won’t, then,” said Ellen sharply, “for she thinks Americans should not ‘fix’ themselves permanently abroad.  She says she means to marry one of her own folks, as she calls her countrymen.”

“She knows an infinite variety of things, and has had all kinds of masters,” sighed Laetitia:  “she speaks all the languages in Europe.  I believe Americans have a peculiar facility for pronunciation, like the Russians, and she learned at her school in America philosophy, rhetoric, logic, Latin, algebra, chemistry.”

“I wonder she should be so sweet a woman,” said my father.  “She seems a good girl—­I never took her for a learned one—­but her mother is a fool, and I should think her father must be that or worse.  I wonder what he can be like?  It seems to an Englishman so strange that a man should stay at home alone for years, and suffer his wife and family to travel all over the Continent without protection.”