Betty Vanderpoel knew nothing which was not American, and only vaguely a few things which were not of New York.  She had lived in Fifth Avenue, attended school in a numbered street near her own home, played in and been driven round Central Park.  She had spent the hot months of the summer in places up the Hudson, or on Long Island, and such resorts of pleasure.  She had believed implicitly in all she saw and knew.  She had been surrounded by wealth and decent good nature throughout her existence, and had enjoyed her life far too much to admit of any doubt that America was the most perfect country in the world, Americans the cleverest and most amusing people, and that other nations were a little out of it, and consequently sufficiently scant of resource to render pity without condemnation a natural sentiment in connection with one’s occasional thoughts of them.

But hers was a mentality by no means ordinary.  Inheritance in her nature had combined with circumstances, as it has a habit of doing in all human beings.  But in her case the combinations were unusual and produced a result somewhat remarkable.  The quality of brains which, in the first Reuben Vanderpoel had expressed itself in the marvellously successful planning and carrying to their ends of commercial and financial schemes, the absolute genius of penetration and calculation of the sordid and uneducated little trader in skins and barterer of goods, having filtered through two generations of gradual education and refinement of existence, which was no longer that of the mere trader, had been transformed in the great-granddaughter into keen, clear sight, level-headed perceptiveness and a logical sense of values.  As the first Reuben had known by instinct the values of pelts and lands, Bettina knew by instinct the values of qualities, of brains, of hearts, of circumstances, and the incidents which affect them.  She was as unaware of the significance of her great possession as were those around her.  Nevertheless it was an unerring thing.  As a mere child, unformed and uneducated by life, she had not been one of the small creatures to be deceived or flattered.

“She’s an awfully smart little thing, that Betty,” her New York aunts and cousins often remarked.  “She seems to see what people mean, it doesn’t matter what they say.  She likes people you would not expect her to like, and then again she sometimes doesn’t care the least for people who are thought awfully attractive.”

As has been already intimated, the child was crude enough and not particularly well bred, but her small brain had always been at work, and each day of her life recorded for her valuable impressions.  The page of her young mind had ceased to be a blank much earlier than is usual.

The comparing of these impressions with such as she received when her life in the French school was new afforded her active mental exercise.