er surroundings seem to affect her in any way.
She moves among the Frenchmen, Poles and Italians of her mother's court
like that lady Shakespeare--or was it Spenser?--wrote about among the
fauns and satyrs. With all her American freedom she avoids improprieties
by instinct. I have no fears for her future if she marries the right
man."

"Indeed, mamma," said Amy, "I wish she would keep more strictly within
the limit of the proprieties. She makes me nervous all the time we are
together."

"My dear, you never heard her breathe a really unbecoming word or saw
her do an immodest thing?" said my mother interrogatively.

"Oh no, of course not," said Amy.

"They say Mrs. Leare wants to marry her to that Neapolitan marquis who
is so often there," put in Ellen. "_On dit_, she will have a _dot_ of
two millions of francs, or, as they call it, half a million of dollars."

"Such a rumor," I broke in, rather annoyed by this turn in the
conversation, "may well buy her the right to be a marchioness if she
will."

"Indeed it won't, then," said Ellen sharply, "for she thinks Americans
should not 'fix' themselves permanently abroad. She says she means to
marry one of her own folks, as she calls her countrymen."

"She knows an infinite variety of things, and has had all kinds of
masters," sighed Laetitia: "she speaks all the languages in Europe. I
believe Americans have a peculiar facility for pronunciation, like the
Russians, and she learned at her school in America philosophy, rhetoric,
logic, Latin, algebra, chemistry."

"I wonder she should be so sweet a woman," said my father. "She seems a
good girl--I never took her for a learned one--but her mother is a fool,
and I should think her father must be that or worse. I wonder what he
can be like? It seems to an Englishman so strange that a man should stay
at home alone for years, and suffer his wife and family to travel all
over the Continent without protection."

Though my father, mother and sisters declined the Sunday invitation of
Mrs. Leare, I went to her reception. The guests were nearly all
Italians, Poles, Spaniards or Frenchmen. There was no Englishman
present, but myself, and only one or two Americans. I felt at once how
out of place my mother, the country matron, and my father, _ce
respectable viellard,_ would have been in such a circle. But Mrs.
Leare's guests were not the _jeunesse doree_ nor the dubious nobility I
had expected to meet in her _salon_. The Frenchmen a