know Continental types and differentiate such peculiarities as were
significant of their ranks and nations. As the first Reuben Vanderpoel
had studied the countenances and indicative methods of the inhabitants
of the new parts of the country in which it was his intention to
do business, so the modernity of his descendant applied itself to
observation for reasons parallel in nature though not in actual kind.
As he had brought beads and firewater to bear as agents upon savages
who would barter for them skins and products which might be turned into
money, so she brought her nineteenth-century beauty, steadfastness of
purpose and alertness of brain to bear upon the matter the practical
dealing with which was the end she held in view. To bear herself in this
matter with as practical a control of situations as that with which
her great-grandfather would have borne himself in making a trade with a
previously unknown tribe of Indians was quite her intention, though it
had not occurred to her to put it to herself in any such form. Still,
whether she was aware of the fact or not, her point of view was exactly
what the first Reuben Vanderpoel's had been on many very different
occasions. She had before her the task of dealing with facts and factors
of which at present she knew but little. Astuteness of perception,
self-command, and adaptability were her chief resources. She was ready,
either for calm, bold approach, or equally calm and wholly non-committal
retreat.

The perceptions she had brought with her filled her journey into Kent
with delicious things, delicious recognition of beauties she had before
known the existence of only through the reading of books, and the
dwelling upon their charms as reproduced, more or less perfectly,
on canvas. She saw roll by her, with the passing of the train, the
loveliness of land and picturesqueness of living which she had saved
for herself with epicurean intention for years. Her fancy, when detached
from her thoughts of her sister, had been epicurean, and she had been
quite aware that it was so. When she had left the suburbs and those
villages already touched with suburbanity behind, she felt herself
settle into a glow of luxurious enjoyment in the freshness of
her pleasure in the familiar, and yet unfamiliar, objects in the
thick-hedged fields, whose broad-branched, thick-foliaged oaks and
beeches were more embowering in their shade, and sweeter in their green
than anything she remembered