She felt so scornfully, so disgustedly indignant at their benighted ignorance, that she knew she behaved very well in saying so little in reply.  She could have said so much, but whatsoever she had said would have conveyed nothing to them, so she thought it all out alone.  She went over the whole ground and little realised how much she was teaching herself as she turned and tossed in her narrow, spotlessly white bed at night, arguing, comparing, drawing deductions from what she knew and did not know of the two continents.  Her childish anger, combining itself with the practical, alert brain of Reuben Vanderpoel the first, developed in her a logical reasoning power which led her to arrive at many an excellent and curiously mature conclusion.  The result was finely educational.  All the more so that in her fevered desire for justification of the things she loved, she began to read books such as little girls do not usually take interest in.  She found some difficulty in obtaining them at first, but a letter or two written to her father obtained for her permission to read what she chose.  The third Reuben Vanderpoel was deeply fond of his younger daughter, and felt in secret a profound admiration for her, which was saved from becoming too obvious by the ever present American sense of humour.

“Betty seems to be going in for politics,” he said after reading the letter containing her request and her first list of books.  “She’s about as mad as she can be at the ignorance of the French girls about America and Americans.  She wants to fill up on solid facts, so that she can come out strong in argument.  She’s got an understanding of the power of solid facts that would be a fortune to her if she were a man.”

It was no doubt her understanding of the power of facts which led her to learn everything well and to develop in many directions.  She began to dip into political and historical volumes because she was furious, and wished to be able to refute idiocy, but she found herself continuing to read because she was interested in a way she had not expected.  She began to see things.  Once she made a remark which was prophetic.  She made it in answer to a guileless observation concerning the gold mines with which Boston was supposed to be enriched.

“You don’t know anything about America, you others,” she said.  “But you will know!”

“Do you think it will become the fashion to travel in America?” asked a German girl.

“Perhaps,” said Betty.  “But—­it isn’t so much that you will go to America.  I believe it will come to you.  It’s like that—­America.  It doesn’t stand still.  It goes and gets what it wants.”

She laughed as she ended, and so did the other girls.  But in ten years’ time, when they were young women, some of them married, some of them court beauties, one of them recalled this speech to another, whom she encountered in an important house in St. Petersburg, the wife of the celebrated diplomat who was its owner being an American woman.