"But you
WILL know!"
"Do you think it will become the fashion to travel in America?" asked a
German girl.
"Perhaps," said Betty. "But--it isn't so much that you will go to
America. I believe it will come to you. It's like that--America. It
doesn't stand still. It goes and gets what it wants."
She laughed as she ended, and so did the other girls. But in ten years'
time, when they were young women, some of them married, some of them
court beauties, one of them recalled this speech to another, whom she
encountered in an important house in St. Petersburg, the wife of the
celebrated diplomat who was its owner being an American woman.
Bettina Vanderpoel's education was a rather fine thing. She herself
had more to do with it than girls usually have to do with their own
training. In a few months' time those in authority in the French school
found that it was not necessary to supervise and expurgate her. She
learned with an interested rapacity which was at once unusual and
amazing. And she evidently did not learn from books alone. Her voice, as
an organ, had been musical and full from babyhood. It began to modulate
itself and to express things most voices are incapable of expressing.
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