“Do you think he would have been the one to give in if they had gone to France?”

“Perhaps not.  And then the marriage would have been unhappy.  Did you never take notice that a woman’s happiness, and consequently the happiness of marriage, depends upon a woman’s having her own way in all social matters?  Before our war all the men who married down South took the Southern view, and all the Southern women who married up North held their own, and sensibly controlled the sympathies of their husbands.”

“And how was it with the Northern women who married South, as you say?”

“Well, it must be confessed that a good many of them adapted themselves, in appearance at least.  Women can do that, and never let anyone see they are not happy and not doing it from choice.”

“And don’t you think American women adapt themselves happily to English life?”

“Doubtless some; I doubt if many do; but women do not confess mistakes of that kind.  Woman’s happiness depends so much upon the continuation of the surroundings and sympathies in which she is bred.  There are always exceptions.  Do you know, Mr. Lyon, it seems to me that some people do not belong in the country where they were born.  We have men who ought to have been born in England, and who only find themselves really they go there.  There are who are ambitious, and court a career different from any that a republic can give them.  They are not satisfied here.  Whether they are happy there I do not know; so few trees, when at all grown, will bear transplanting.”

“Then you think international marriages are a mistake?”

“Oh, I don’t theorize on subjects I am ignorant of.”

“You give me very cold comfort.”

“I didn’t know,” said Margaret, with a laugh that was too genuine to be consoling, “that you were traveling for comfort; I thought it was for information.”

“And I am getting a great deal,” said Mr. Lyon, rather ruefully.  “I’m trying to find out where.  I ought to have been born.”

“I’m not sure,” Margaret said, half seriously, “but you would have been a very good American.”

This was not much of an admission, after all, but it was the most that Margaret had ever made, and Mr. Lyon tried to get some encouragement out of it.  But he felt, as any man would feel, that this beating about the bush, this talk of nationality and all that, was nonsense; that if a woman loved a man she wouldn’t care where he was born; that all the world would be as nothing to him; that all conditions and obstacles society and family could raise would melt away in the glow of a real passion.  And he wondered for a moment if American girls were not “calculating”—­a word to which he had learned over here to attach a new and comical meaning.

V

The afternoon after this conversation Miss Forsythe was sitting reading in her favorite window-seat when Mr. Lyon was announced.  Margaret was at her school.  There was nothing un usual in this afternoon call; Mr. Lyon’s visits had become frequent and informal; but Miss Forsythe had a nervous presentiment that something important was to happen, that showed itself in her greeting, and which was perhaps caught from a certain new diffidence in his manner.