she could not ignore the fact that the value he set on things—­in morals, society, or art—­depended on their power to strike the eye.  She had smiled at that, as at something which, after all, was harmless.  She had smiled, too, when he offered to himself—­and to her also, it had to be admitted—­the best of whatever could be had, since, presumably, he could afford it; though, as far as she was concerned, she would have been happier with simpler standards and a less ambitious mode of life.  In following the path her parents had marked out for her, and to some extent beaten in advance, she had acquiesced in their plans rather than developed wishes of her own.  Having grown tired of her annual round of American and English country-houses, with interludes for Paris, Biarritz, or Cannes, she had gone on chiefly because, as far as she could see, there was nothing else to do.

Looking at him now, it came over her for the first time that she must be a disappointment to him.  He had never given her reason to suspect it, and yet it must be so.  First among the aims for which he had been striving, and to attain to which he had hazarded so much, there must have been the hope that she should make a brilliant match.  That, and that alone, would have given them as a family the sure international position he had coveted, and which plenty of other Americans were successful in securing.

It was only of late years, with the growth of her own independent social judgment, that she could look back over the past and see the Guions as in the van of that movement of the New World back upon the Old of which the force was forever augmenting.  As Drusilla Fane was fond of saying, it was a manifestation of the nomadic, or perhaps the predatory, spirit characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon peoples.  It was part of that impulse to expand, annex, appropriate, which had urged the Angles to descend on the shores of Kent and the Normans to cross from Dives to Hastings.  Later, it had driven their descendants over the Atlantic, as individuals, as households, or as “churches”; and now, from their rich, comfortable, commonplace homes in New England, Illinois, or California, it bade later descendants still lift up their eyes and see how much there was to be desired in the lands their ancestors had left behind—­fair parks, stately manors, picturesque chateaux, sonorous titles, and varied, dignified ways of living.

To a people with the habit of compassing sea and land to get whatever was good to have the voyage back was nothing, especially in the days of easy money and steam.  The Guions had been among the first to make it.  They had been among the first Americans to descend on the shores of Europe with the intention—­more or less obscure, more or less acknowledged, as the case might be—­of acquiring and enjoying the treasures of tradition by association or alliance or any other means that might present themselves.  Richard Guion, grandfather of Henry Guion, found the way to cut a dash in the Paris of the early Second Empire and to marry his daughter, Victoria Guion, to the Marquis de Melcourt.  From the simple American point of view of that day and date it was a dazzling match, long talked of by the naive press of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.