“I’ve not had time, but I’ve done it,” he answered.  “Anything that hurts your mother hurts me.  Sometimes she begins to cry in her sleep, and when I wake her she tells me she has been dreaming that she has seen Rosy.”

“I have had time to think of her,” said Bettina.  “I have heard so much of these things.  I was at school in Germany when Annie Butterfield and Baron von Steindahl were married.  I heard it talked about there, and then my mother sent me some American papers.”

She laughed a little, and for a moment her laugh did not sound like a girl’s.

“Well, it’s turned out badly enough,” her father commented.  “The papers had plenty to say about it later.  There wasn’t much he was too good to do to his wife, apparently.”

“There was nothing too bad for him to do before he had a wife,” said Bettina.  “He was black.  It was an insolence that he should have dared to speak to Annie Butterfield.  Somebody ought to have beaten him.”

“He beat her instead.”

“Yes, and I think his family thought it quite natural.  They said that she was so vulgar and American that she exasperated Frederick beyond endurance.  She was not geboren, that was it.”  She laughed her severe little laugh again.  “Perhaps we shall get tired in time,” she added.  “I think we are learning.  If it is made a matter of business quite open and aboveboard, it will be fair.  You know, father, you always said that I was businesslike.”

There was interested curiosity in Vanderpoel’s steady look at her.  There were times when he felt that Betty’s summing up of things was well worth listening to.  He saw that now she was in one of her moods when it would pay one to hear her out.  She held her chin up a little, and her face took on a fine stillness at once sweet and unrelenting.  She was very good to look at in such moments.

“Yes,” he answered, “you have a particularly level head for a girl.”

“Well,” she went on.  “What I see is that these things are not business, and they ought to be.  If a man comes to a rich American girl and says, ‘I and my title are for sale.  Will you buy us?’ If the girl is—­is that kind of a girl and wants that kind of man, she can look them both over and say, ‘Yes, I will buy you,’ and it can be arranged.  He will not return the money if he is unsatisfactory, but she cannot complain that she has been deceived.  She can only complain of that when he pretends that he asks her to marry him because he wants her for his wife, because he would want her for his wife if she were as poor as himself.  Let it be understood that he is property for sale, let her make sure that he is the kind of property she wants to buy.  Then, if, when they are married, he is brutal or impudent, or his people are brutal or impudent, she can say, ’I will forfeit the purchase money, but I will not forfeit myself.  I will not stay with you.’”

“They would not like to hear you say that, Betty,” said her father, rubbing his chin reflectively.