The Shuttle | Page 8

who were all too wonderfully dressed and too lavishly
supplied with pocket money. The school considered itself especially
refined and select, but was in fact interestingly vulgar.
The inordinately rich little girls, who had most of them pretty and
spiritual or pretty and piquant faces, ate a great many bon bons and
chattered a great deal in high unmodulated voices about the parties their
sisters and other relatives went to and the dresses they wore. Some of
them were nice little souls, who in the future would emerge from their
chrysalis state enchanting women, but they used colloquialisms freely,
and had an ingenuous habit of referring to the prices of things. Bettina
Vanderpoel, who was the richest and cleverest and most promisingly
handsome among them, was colloquial to slanginess, but she had a
deep, mellow, child voice and an amazing carriage.
She could not endure Sir Nigel Anstruthers, and, being an American
child, did not hesitate to express herself with force, if with some
crudeness. "He's a hateful thing," she said, "I loathe him. He's stuck up

and he thinks you are afraid of him and he likes it."
Sir Nigel had known only English children, little girls who lived in that
discreet corner of their parents' town or country houses known as "the
schoolroom," apparently emerging only for daily walks with
governesses; girls with long hair and boys in little high hats and with
faces which seemed curiously made to match them. Both boys and girls
were decently kept out of the way and not in the least dwelt on except
when brought out for inspection during the holidays and taken to the
pantomime.
Sir Nigel had not realised that an American child was an absolute factor
to be counted with, and a "youngster" who entered the drawing-room
when she chose and joined fearlessly in adult conversation was an
element he considered annoying. It was quite true that Bettina talked
too much and too readily at times, but it had not been explained to her
that the opinions of eight years are not always of absorbing interest to
the mature. It was also true that Sir Nigel was a great fool for
interfering with what was clearly no affair of his in such a manner as
would have made him an enemy even had not the child's instinct
arrayed her against him at the outset.
"You American youngsters are too cheeky," he said on one of the
occasions when Betty had talked too much. "If you were my sister and
lived at Stornham Court, you would be learning lessons in the
schoolroom and wearing a pinafore. Nobody ever saw my sister Emily
when she was your age."
"Well, I'm not your sister Emily," retorted Betty, "and I guess I'm glad
of it."
It was rather impudent of her, but it must be confessed that she was not
infrequently rather impudent in a rude little-girl way, but she was
serenely unconscious of the fact.
Sir Nigel flushed darkly and laughed a short, unpleasant laugh. If she
had been his sister Emily she would have fared ill at the moment, for
his villainous temper would have got the better of him.

"I `guess' that I may be congratulated too," he sneered.
"If I was going to be anybody's sister Emily," said Betty, excited a little
by the sense of the fray, "I shouldn't want to be yours."
"Now Betty, don't be hateful," interposed Rosalie, laughing, and her
laugh was nervous. "There's Mina Thalberg coming up the front steps.
Go and meet her."
Rosalie, poor girl, always found herself nervous when Sir Nigel and
Betty were in the room together. She instinctively recognised their
antagonism and was afraid Betty would do something an English
baronet would think vulgar. Her simple brain could not have explained
to her why it was that she knew Sir Nigel often thought New Yorkers
vulgar. She was, however, quite aware of this but imperfectly
concealed fact, and felt a timid desire to be explanatory.
When Bettina marched out of the room with her extraordinary carriage
finely manifest, Rosy's little laugh was propitiatory.
"You mustn't mind her," she said. "She's a real splendid little thing, but
she's got a quick temper. It's all over in a minute."
"They wouldn't stand that sort of thing in England," said Sir Nigel.
"She's deucedly spoiled, you know."
He detested the child. He disliked all children, but this one awakened in
him more than mere dislike. The fact was that though Betty herself was
wholly unconscious of the subtle truth, the as yet undeveloped intellect
which later made her a brilliant and captivating personality, vaguely
saw him as he was, an unscrupulous, sordid brute, as remorseless an
adventurer and swindler in his special line, as if he had been engaged in
drawing false cheques