It became understood that they were amusing and amazing.
Americans "came in" as the heroes and heroines of novels and stories.
Punch delighted in them vastly. Shopkeepers and hotel proprietors
stocked, furnished, and provisioned for them. They spent money
enormously and were singularly indifferent (at the outset) under
imposition. They "came over" in a manner as epoch-making, though less
war-like than that of William the Conqueror.
International marriages ceased to be a novelty. As Bettina Vanderpoel
grew up, she grew up, so to speak, in the midst of them. She saw her
country, its people, its newspapers, its literature, innocently rejoiced
by the alliances its charming young women contracted with foreign
rank. She saw it affectionately, gleefully, rubbing its hands over its
duchesses, its countesses, its miladies. The American Eagle spread its
wings and flapped them sometimes a trifle, over this new but so natural
and inevitable triumph of its virgins. It was of course only "American"
that such things should happen. America ruled the universe, and its
women ruled America, bullying it a little, prettily, perhaps. What could
be more a matter of course than that American women, being aided by
adoring fathers, brothers and husbands, sumptuously to ship themselves
to other lands, should begin to rule these lands also? Betty, in her
growing up, heard all this intimated.
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