. We trifle
with France and labour with Germany, we sentimentalise over Italy and
ecstacise over Spain--but England we love. How it moves us when we go
to it, how we gush if we are simple and effusive, how we are stirred
imaginatively if we are of the perceptive class. I have heard the
commonest little half-educated woman say the prettiest, clumsy,
emotional things about what she has seen there. A New England
schoolma'am, who has made a Cook's tour, will almost have tears in her
voice as she wanders on with her commonplaces about hawthorn hedges and
thatched cottages and white or red farms. Why are we not unconsciously
pathetic about German cottages and Italian villas? Because we have not,
in centuries past, had the habit of being born in them. It is only
an English cottage and an English lane, whether white with hawthorn
blossoms or bare with winter, that wakes in us that little yearning,
grovelling tenderness that is so sweet. It is only nature calling us
home."

Mrs. Worthington came in during the course of the morning to find her
standing before her window looking out at the Thames, the Embankment,
the hansom cabs themselves, with an absolutely serious absorption. This
changed to a smile as she turned to greet her.

"I am delighted," she said. "I could scarcely tell you how much. The
impression is all new and I am excited a little by everything. I am so
intensely glad that I have saved it so long and that I have known it
only as part of literature. I am even charmed that it rains, and that
the cabmen's mackintoshes are shining and wet." She drew forward a
chair, and Mrs. Worthington sat down, looking at her with involuntary
admiration.

"You look as if you were delighted," she said. "Your eyes--you have
amazing eyes, Betty! I am trying to picture to myself what Lady
Anstruthers will feel when she sees you. What were you like when she
married?"

Bettina sat down, smiling and looking, indeed, quite incredibly lovely.
She was capable of a warmth and a sweetness which were as embracing as
other qualities she possessed were powerful.

"I was eight years old," she said. "I was a rude little girl, with
long legs and a high, determined voice. I know I was rude. I remember
answering back."

"I seem to have heard that you did not like your brother-in-law, and
that you were opposed to the marriage."

"Imagine the undisciplined audacity of a child of eight 'opposing' the
marriage of her grown-up sister. I was quite ca