She was taken out in a luxurious little brougham to shops whose varied allurements were placed eagerly at her disposal.  Respectful persons, obedient to her most faintly-expressed desire, displayed garments as wonderful as those the New York trunks had revealed.  She was besought to consider the fitness of articles whose exquisiteness she was almost afraid to look at.  Her thin little body was wonderfully fitted, managed, encouraged to make the most of its long-ignored outlines.

“Her ladyship’s slenderness is a great advantage,” said the wisely inciting ones.  “There is no such advantage as delicacy of line.”

Summing up the character of their customer with the saleswoman’s eye, they realised the discretion of turning to Miss Vanderpoel for encouragement, though she was the younger of the two, and bore no title.  They were aware of the existence of persons of rank who were not lavish patrons, but the name of Vanderpoel held most promising suggestions.  To an English shopkeeper the American has, of late years, represented the spender—­the type which, whatsoever its rank and resources, has, mysteriously, always money to hand over counters in exchange for things it chances to desire to possess.  Each year surges across the Atlantic a horde of these fortunate persons, who, to the sober, commercial British mind, appear to be free to devote their existences to travel and expenditure.  This contingent appears shopping in the various shopping thoroughfares; it buys clothes, jewels, miscellaneous attractive things, making its purchases of articles useful or decorative with a freedom from anxiety in its enjoyment which does not mark the mood of the ordinary shopper.  In the everyday purchaser one is accustomed to take for granted, as a factor in his expenditure, a certain deliberation and uncertainty; to the travelling American in Europe, shopping appears to be part of the holiday which is being made the most of.  Surely, all the neat, smart young persons who buy frocks and blouses, hats and coats, hosiery and chains, cannot be the possessors of large incomes; there must be, even in America, a middle class of middle-class resources, yet these young persons, male and female, and most frequently unaccompanied by older persons—­seeing what they want, greet it with expressions of pleasure, waste no time in appropriating and paying for it, and go away as in relief and triumph—­not as in that sober joy which is clouded by afterthought.  The sales people are sometimes even vaguely cheered by their gay lack of any doubt as to the wisdom of their getting what they admire, and rejoicing in it.  If America always buys in this holiday mood, it must be an enviable thing to be a shopkeeper in their New York or Boston or San Francisco.  Who would not make a fortune among them?  They want what they want, and not something which seems to them less desirable, but they open their purses and—­frequently with some amused uncertainty as to the differences