Her haziness about distinctions of rank filled these Europeans with an amused amazement.  There was to them something quite royal in her naivety and lack of awe; in her high spirit, her vivacity, and her absolute disregard of those who failed to please her.  She convulsed one personage by describing another as “that tiresome old man who’s really too disreputable to have tagging around me any longer”; and had a quarrel and a making up with a reigning duke about a lighter of coal that their respective crews had come to blows over.  Everybody adored her, and she seldom put to sea without a love-sick yacht in her wake.

Of course, here as elsewhere, every phase of human character was displayed, and most conspicuous of all amongst the evil was the determination of many to win Florence’s millions for themselves.  Amid that noble concourse of vessels, every one of which stood for a princely income, there were adventurers as needy and as hungry as any sharper in the streets of New York.  There is an aristocratic poverty, none the less real because three noughts must be added to all the figures, that first surprised and then disgusted the pretty American.  Her first awakening to the fact was when, as a special favour, she sold her best steam launch to a French marquise at the price it had cost her.  Though that lady was very profuse with little pink notes and could purr over Florence by the hour, her signature on a cheque was never forthcoming, and our heroine had a fit of fury to think of having been so deceived.

“It was a downright confidence trick,” she burst out to the comte de Souvary, firing up afresh with the memory of her wrongs.  “I loved my launch.  It was a beauty.  It never went dotty at the time you needed it most and it was a vertical inverted triple-expansion direct-acting propeller!’ (Florence could always rattle off technical details and showed her Americanism in her catalogue-like fluency in this respect.) “And I miss it and I want it back, and the horrid old woman never means to pay me a penny!”

“Oh, my child!” said the count, “she never pays anybody ze penny.  She is a stone from which one looks in vain for blood.  Your launch is—­what do you call it in ze Far Vest—­a goner!”

“But she’s descended from Charlemagne,” cried Florence.  “She has the entree to all the courts.  She ought to be exposed for stealing my boat!”

“What does anybody do when he is robbed?” said the count philosophically.  He could afford to be philosophical:  it wasn’t his vertical inverted triple-expansion direct-acting propeller.  “Smile and be more careful ze next time,” he went on.  “The marquise’s reputation is international for what is charitably called her eccentricity.”

“In America they put people in jail for that kind of eccentricity!” exclaimed Florence.

“Oh, the best way in Europe is money-with-order,” said the count, “what I remember once a friend seeing in that great country of which you are ze ornament—­in God we trust:  all others cash!”