between sovereigns and half-sovereigns, florins and half-crowns—­they pay their bills with something almost like glee.  They are remarkably prompt about bills—­which is an excellent thing, as they are nearly always just going somewhere else, to France or Germany or Italy or Scotland or Siberia.  Those of us who are shopkeepers, or their salesmen, do not dream that some of them have incomes no larger than our own, that they work for their livings, that they are teachers journalists, small writers or illustrators of papers or magazines that they are unimportant soldiers of fortune, but, with their queer American insistence on exploration, and the ignoring of limitations, they have, somehow, managed to make this exultant dash for a few daring weeks or months of freedom and new experience.  If we knew this, we should regard them from our conservative standpoint of provident decorum as improvident lunatics, being ourselves unable to calculate with their odd courage and their cheerful belief in themselves.  What we do know is that they spend, and we are far from disdaining their patronage, though most of them have an odd little familiarity of address and are not stamped with that distinction which causes us to realise the enormous difference between the patron and the tradesman, and makes us feel the worm we remotely like to feel ourselves, though we would not for worlds acknowledge the fact.  Mentally, and in our speech, both among our equals and our superiors, we condescend to and patronise them a little, though that, of course, is the fine old insular attitude it would be un-British to discourage.  But, if we are not in the least definite concerning the position and resources of these spenders as a mass, we are quite sure of a select number.  There is mention of them in the newspapers, of the town houses, the castles, moors, and salmon fishings they rent, of their yachts, their presentations actually at our own courts, of their presence at great balls, at Ascot and Goodwood, at the opera on gala nights.  One staggers sometimes before the public summing-up of the amount of their fortunes.  These people who have neither blood nor rank, these men who labour in their business offices, are richer than our great dukes, at the realising of whose wealth and possessions we have at times almost turned pale.

“Them!” chaffed a costermonger over his barrow.  “Blimme, if some o’ them blokes won’t buy Buckin’am Pallis an’ the ‘ole R’yal Fambly some mornin’ when they’re out shoppin’.”

The subservient attendants in more than one fashionable shop Betty and her sister visit, know that Miss Vanderpoel is of the circle, though her father has not as yet bought or hired any great estate, and his daughter has not been seen in London.

“Its queer we’ve never heard of her being presented,” one shopgirl says to another.  “Just you look at her.”