Because she thought so often of Rosalie, her attention was, during the passing years, naturally attracted by the many things she heard of such marriages as were made by Americans with men of other countries than their own.  She discovered that notwithstanding certain commercial views of matrimony, all foreigners who united themselves with American heiresses were not the entire brutes primitive prejudice might lead one to imagine.  There were rather one-sided alliances which proved themselves far from happy.  The Cousin Gaston, for instance, brought home a bride whose fortune rebuilt and refurnished his dilapidated chateau and who ended by making of him a well-behaved and cheery country gentleman not at all to be despised in his amiable, if light-minded good nature and good spirits.  His wife, fortunately, was not a young woman who yearned for sentiment.  She was a nice-tempered, practical American girl, who adored French country life and knew how to amuse and manage her husband.  It was a genial sort of menage and yet though this was an undeniable fact, Bettina observed that when the union was spoken of it was always referred to with a certain tone which conveyed that though one did not exactly complain of its having been undesirable, it was not quite what Gaston might have expected.  His wife had money and was good-natured, but there were limitations to one’s appreciation of a marriage in which husband and wife were not on the same plane.

“She is an excellent person, and it has been good for Gaston,” said Bettina’s friend.  “We like her, but she is not—­she is not——­” She paused there, evidently seeing that the remark was unlucky.  Bettina, who was still in short frocks, took her up.

“What is she not?” she asked.

“Ah!—­it is difficult to explain—­to Americans.  It is really not exactly a fault.  But she is not of his world.”

“But if he does not like that,” said Bettina coolly, “why did he let her buy him and pay for him?”

It was young and brutal, but there were times when the business perspicuity of the first Reuben Vanderpoel, combining with the fiery, wounded spirit of his young descendant, rendered Bettina brutal.  She saw certain unadorned facts with unsparing young eyes and wanted to state them.  After her frocks were lengthened, she learned how to state them with more fineness of phrase, but even then she was sometimes still rather unsparing.

In this case her companion, who was not fiery of temperament, only coloured slightly.

“It was not quite that,” she answered.  “Gaston really is fond of her.  She amuses him, and he says she is far cleverer than he is.”