“I believe that woman is an American,” she would say.  “That girl looks as if she were a New Yorker,” again.  “That man’s face looks as if it belonged to Broadway.  Oh, Betty! do you think I am right?  I should say those girls getting out of the hansom to go into Burnham & Staples’ came from out West and are going to buy thousands of things.  Don’t they look like it?”

She began to lean forward and look on at things with an interest so unlike her Stornham listlessness that Betty’s heart was moved.

Her face looked alive, and little waves of colour rose under her skin.  Several times she laughed the natural little laugh of her girlhood which it had seemed almost too much to expect to hear again.  The first of these laughs came when she counted her tenth American, a tall Westerner of the cartoon type, sauntering along with an expression of speculative enjoyment on his odd face, and evidently, though furtively, chewing tobacco.

“I absolutely love him, Betty,” she cried.  “You couldn’t mistake him for anything else.”

“No,” answered Betty, feeling that she loved him herself, “not if you found him embalmed in the Pyramids.”

They pleased themselves immensely, trying to guess what he would buy and take home to his wife and girls in his Western town—­though Western towns were very grand and amazing in these days, Betty explained, and knew they could give points to New York.  He would not buy the things he would have bought fifteen years ago.  Perhaps, in fact, his wife and daughters had come with him to London and stayed at the Metropole or the Savoy, and were at this moment being fitted by tailors and modistes patronised by Royalty.

“Rosy, look!  Do you see who that is?  Do you recognise her?  It is Mrs. Bellingham.  She was little Mina Thalberg.  She married Captain Bellingham.  He was quite poor, but very well born—­a nephew of Lord Dunholm’s.  He could not have married a poor girl—­but they have been so happy together that Mina is growing fat, and spends her days in taking reducing treatments.  She says she wouldn’t care in the least, but Dicky fell in love with her waist and shoulder line.”

The plump, pretty young woman getting out of her victoria before a fashionable hairdresser’s looked radiant enough.  She had not yet lost the waist and shoulder line, though her pink frock fitted her with discreet tightness.  She paused a moment to pat and fuss prettily over the two blooming, curly children who were to remain under the care of the nurse, who sat on the back seat, holding the baby on her lap.

“I should not have known her,” said Rosy.  “She has grown pretty.  She wasn’t a pretty child.”

“It’s happiness—­and the English climate—­and Captain Dicky.  They adore each other, and laugh at everything like a pair of children.  They were immensely popular in New York last winter, when they visited Mina’s people.”