Betty Vanderpoel knew nothing which was not American, and only vaguely
a few things which were not of New York. She had lived in Fifth Avenue,
attended school in a numbered street near her own home, played in and
been driven round Central Park. She had spent the hot months of the
summer in places up the Hudson, or on Long Island, and such resorts of
pleasure. She had believed implicitly in all she saw and knew. She
had been surrounded by wealth and decent good nature throughout her
existence, and had enjoyed her life far too much to admit of any doubt
that America was the most perfect country in the world, Americans the
cleverest and most amusing people, and that other nations were a little
out of it, and consequently sufficiently scant of resource to render
pity without condemnation a natural sentiment in connection with one's
occasional thoughts of them.
But hers was a mentality by no means ordinary. Inheritance in her nature
had combined with circumstances, as it has a habit of doing in all human
beings. But in her case the combinations were unusual and produced a
result somewhat remarkable. The quality of brains which, in the first
Reuben Vanderpoel had expressed itself in the marvellously successful
planning and carrying to their ends of commercial and financial schemes,
the absolute genius of penetration and calculation of the sordid and
uneducated little trader in skins and barterer of goods, having
filtered through two generations of gradual education and refinement
of existence, which was no longer that of the mere trader, had
been transformed in the great-granddaughter into keen, clear sight,
level-headed perceptiveness and a logical sense of values.
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