likes people you would not expect her
to like, and then again she sometimes doesn't care the least for people
who are thought awfully attractive."

As has been already intimated, the child was crude enough and not
particularly well bred, but her small brain had always been at work, and
each day of her life recorded for her valuable impressions. The page of
her young mind had ceased to be a blank much earlier than is usual.

The comparing of these impressions with such as she received when her
life in the French school was new afforded her active mental exercise.

She began with natural, secret indignation and rebellion. There was no
other American pupil in the establishment besides herself. But for the
fact that the name of Vanderpoel represented wealth so enormous as
to amount to a sort of rank in itself, Bettina would not have been
received. The proprietress of the institution had gravely disquieting
doubts of the propriety of America. Her pupils were not accustomed
to freedom of opinions and customs. An American child might either
consciously or unconsciously introduce them. As this must be guarded
against, Betty's first few months at the school were not agreeable to
her. She was supervised and expurgated, as it were. Special Sisters
were told off to converse and walk with her, and she soon perceived
that conversations were not only French lessons in disguise, but were
lectures on ethics, morals, and good manners, imperfectly concealed
by the mask and domino of amiable entertainment. She translated into
English after the following manner the facts her swift young perceptions
gathered. There were things it was so inelegant to say that only
the most impossible persons said them; there were things it was so
inexcusable to do that when done their inexcusability assumed the
proportions of a crime. There were movements, expressions, points of
view, which one must avoid as one would avoid the plague. And they were
all things, acts, expressions, attitudes of mind which Bettina had
been familiar with from her infancy, and which she was well aware were
considered almost entirely harmless and unobjectionable in New York,
in her beloved New York, which was the centre of the world, which was
bigger, richer, gayer, more admirable than any other city known upon the
earth.

If she had not so loved it, if she had ever dreamed of the existence of
any other place as being absolutely necessary, she would not have felt
the thing so