which landed one, after a more or less interesting voyage, in Liverpool, or at some other convenient port.  From there one went to London, or Paris, or Rome; in fact, whithersoever one’s fancy guided, but first or last it always led the traveller to the treading of green, velvet English turf.  And once standing on such velvet, both men and women, looking about them, felt, despite themselves, the strange old thrill which some of them half resented and some warmly loved.

In the course of twelve years, a length of time which will transform a little girl wearing a short frock into a young woman wearing a long one, the pace of life and the ordering of society may become so altered as to appear amazing when one finds time to reflect on the subject.  But one does not often find time.  Changes occur so gradually that one scarcely observes them, or so swiftly that they take the form of a kind of amazed shock which one gets over as quickly as one experiences it and realises that its cause is already a fixed fact.

In the United States of America, which have not yet acquired the serene sense of conservative self-satisfaction and repose which centuries of age may bestow, the spirit of life itself is the aspiration for change.  Ambition itself only means the insistence on change.  Each day is to be better than yesterday fuller of plans, of briskness, of initiative.  Each to-day demands of to-morrow new men, new minds, new work.  A to-day which has not launched new ships, explored new countries, constructed new buildings, added stories to old ones, may consider itself a failure, unworthy even of being consigned to the limbo of respectable yesterdays.  Such a country lives by leaps and bounds, and the ten years which followed the marriage of Reuben Vanderpoel’s eldest daughter made many such bounds and leaps.  They were years which initiated and established international social relations in a manner which caused them to incorporate themselves with the history of both countries.  As America discovered Europe, that continent discovered America.  American beauties began to appear in English drawing-rooms and Continental salons.  They were presented at court and commented upon in the Row and the Bois.  Their little transatlantic tricks of speech and their mots were repeated with gusto.  It became understood that they were amusing and amazing.  Americans “came in” as the heroes and heroines of novels and stories.  Punch delighted in them vastly.  Shopkeepers and hotel proprietors stocked, furnished, and provisioned for them.  They spent money enormously and were singularly indifferent (at the outset) under imposition.  They “came over” in a manner as epoch-making, though less war-like than that of William the Conqueror.