From the easy conquest of the men who looked at her Lottie proceeded to the subjection of the women.  It would have been more difficult to put these down, if the process had not been so largely, so almost entirely subjective.  As it was, Lottie exchanged snubs with many ladies of the continental nationalities who were never aware of having offered or received offence.  In some cases, when they fearlessly ventured to speak with her, they behaved very amiable, and seemed to find her conduct sufficiently gracious in return.  In fact, she was approachable enough, and had no shame, before Boyne, in dismounting from the high horse which she rode when alone with him, and meeting these ladies on foot, at least half-way.  She made several of them acquainted with her mother, who, after a timorous reticence, found them very conversable, with a range of topics, however, that shocked her American sense of decorum.  One Dutch lady talked with such manly freedom, and with such untrammelled intimacy, that she was obliged to send Boyne and Lottie about their business, upon an excuse that was not apparent to the Dutch lady.  She only complimented Mrs. Kenton upon her children and their devotion to each other, and when she learned that Ellen was also her daughter, ventured the surmise she was not long married.

“It isn’t her husband,” Mrs. Kenton explained, with inward trouble.  “It’s just a gentleman that came over with us,” and she went with her trouble to her own husband as soon as she could.

“I’m afraid it isn’t the custom to go around alone with young men as much as Ellen thinks,” she suggested.

“He ought to know,” said the judge.  “I don’t suppose he would if it wasn’t.”

“That is true,” Mrs. Kenton owned, and for the time she put her misgivings away.

“So long as we do nothing wrong,” the judge decided, “I don’t see why we should not keep to our own customs.”

“Lottie says they’re not ours, in New York.”

“Well, we are not in New York now.”

They had neither of them the heart to interfere with Ellen’s happiness, for, after all, Breckon was careful enough of the appearances, and it was only his being constantly with Ellen that suggested the Dutch lady’s surmise.  In fact, the range of their wanderings was not beyond the dunes, though once they went a little way on one of the neatly bricked country roads that led towards The Hague.  As yet there had been no movement in any of the party to see the places that lie within such easy tram-reach of The Hague, and the hoarded interest of the past in their keeping.  Ellen chose to dwell in the actualities which were an enlargement of her own present, and Lottie’s active spirit found employment enough in the amusements at the Kurhaus.  She shopped in the little bazars which make a Saratoga under the colonnades fronting two sides of the great space before the hotel, and she formed a critical and exacting taste in music from a constant attendance at the afternoon