The Spread Eagle, and Other Stories | Page 7

teach her the long litany of success:
Money is God; We praise thee, etc.,
a very long, somewhat truthful, and truly degraded litany. She taught her that it isn't handsome is as handsome does, but the boots and shoes, after all. She taught her that a girl must dress beautifully to be beautiful, that she must learn all the world's ways and secrets, and at the same time appear in speech and manner like a child of Nature, like a newly opened rose. And she taught her to love her country like this:
"America, my dear, is the one place where a girl can marry enough money to live somewhere else. Or, if her husband is tied to his affairs, it is the one place where she can get the most for his money--not as we get the most for ours, for we couldn't live two minutes on our income in America--but where the most people will bow the lowest to her because she is rich; where she will be the most courted and the most envied."
The two mammas worked along similar lines, but for different reasons. Mrs. Burton strove to make Eve ornamental so that she might acquire millions; Mrs. Williams strove to Anglicize and Europeanize her son so that he might ornament those which were already his. Those little spread eagles, the corpuscles in his blood, folded their wings a trifle as he grew older, and weren't always so ready to scream and boast; but they remained eagles, and no amount of Eton and Oxford could turn them into little unicorns or lions. You may wonder why Fitz's father, a strong, sane man, permitted such attempts at denationalization upon his son and heir. Fitz so wondered--once. So wrote. And was answered thus:
... If you're any good it will all come out in the wash. If you aren't any good it doesn't matter whether your mother makes an Englishman out of you or a Mandarin. When you come of age you'll be your own man; that's been the bargain between your mother and me. That will be the time for you to decide whether to be governed or to help govern. I am not afraid for you. I never have been.
So Mrs. Williams was not successful on the whole in her attempts to make a cosmopolitan of Fitz. And that was just enough, because the attempts were those of an amateur. She had lived a furiously active life of pleasure; she had made an unassailable place for herself in the best European society, as at home. She had not even become estranged from her husband. They were always crossing the ocean to see each other, "if only for a minute or two," as she used to say, and when Fitz was at school she spent much of her time in America; and Fitz's short vacations were wild sprees with his father and mother, come over for the purpose. Mr. Williams would take an immense country house for a few weeks, with shooting and riding and all sorts of games thrown in, and have Fitz's friends by the dozen. But, like as not, Mr. Williams would leave in the middle of it, as fast as trains and steamers could carry him, home to his affairs. And even the little English boys missed him sorely, since he was much kinder to them, as a rule, than their own fathers were, and had always too many sovereigns in his pocket for his own comfort.
But Mrs. Burton's attempts to make a charming cosmopolitan of Eve met with the greater success that they deserved. They were the efforts of a professional, one who had staked life or death, so to speak, on the result. Where Mrs. Williams amused herself and achieved small victories, Mrs. Burton fought and achieved great conquests. She saved money out of her thin income, money for the great days to come when Eve was to be presented to society at Newport; and she slaved and toiled grimly and with far-seeing genius. Eve's speaking voice was, perhaps, Mrs. Burton's and her own greatest triumph. It was Ellen Terry's youngest, freshest voice over again, but with the na?vest little ghost of a French accent; and she didn't seem so much to project a phrase at you by the locutory muscles as to smile it to you.
Mrs. Burton had, of course, her moments of despair about Eve. But these were mostly confined to that despairing period when most girls are nothing but arms and wrists and gawkiness and shyness; when their clear, bright complexions turn muddy, and they want to enter convents. Eve at this period in her life was unusually trying and nondescript. She announced that if she ever married it would be for love alone, but that she did not intend to marry. She