“You did not treat Sir Nigel Anstruthers as one of your betters.”

“He was one of my elders, at all events, and becomingness of bearing should have taught me to hold my little tongue.  I am giving some thought now to the kind of thing I must invent as a suitable apology when I find him a really delightful person, full of virtues and accomplishments.  Perhaps he has a horror of me.”

“I should like to be present at your first meeting,” Mrs. Worthington reflected.  “You are going down to Stornham to-morrow?”

“That is my plan.  When I write to you on my arrival, I will tell you if I encountered the horror.”  Then, with a swift change of subject and a lifting of her slender, velvet line of eyebrow, “I am only deploring that I have not time to visit the Tower.”

Mrs. Worthington was betrayed into a momentary glance of uncertainty, almost verging in its significance on a gasp.

“The Tower?  Of London?  Dear Betty!”

Bettina’s laugh was mellow with revelation.

“Ah!” she said.  “You don’t know my point of view; it’s plain enough.  You see, when I delight in these things, I think I delight most in my delight in them.  It means that I am almost having the kind of feeling the fresh American souls had who landed here thirty years ago and revelled in the resemblance to Dickens’s characters they met with in the streets, and were historically thrilled by the places where people’s heads were chopped off.  Imagine their reflections on Charles I., when they stood in Whitehall gazing on the very spot where that poor last word was uttered—­’Remember.’  And think of their joy when each crossing sweeper they gave disproportionate largess to, seemed Joe All Alones in the slightest disguise.”

“You don’t mean to say——­” Mrs. Worthington was vaguely awakening to the situation.

“That the charm of my visit, to myself, is that I realise that I am rather like that.  I have positively preserved something because I have kept away.  You have been here so often and know things so well, and you were even so sophisticated when you began, that you have never really had the flavours and emotions.  I am sophisticated, too, sophisticated enough to have cherished my flavours as a gourmet tries to save the bouquet of old wine.  You think that the Tower is the pleasure of housemaids on a Bank Holiday.  But it quite makes me quiver to think of it,” laughing again.  “That I laugh, is the sign that I am not as beautifully, freshly capable of enjoyment as those genuine first Americans were, and in a way I am sorry for it.”

Mrs. Worthington laughed also, and with an enjoyment.

“You are very clever, Betty,” she said.

“No, no,” answered Bettina, “or, if I am, almost everybody is clever in these days.  We are nearly all of us comparatively intelligent.”

“You are very interesting at all events, and the Anstruthers will exult in you.  If they are dull in the country, you will save them.”