She looked
at them much more frankly than they looked at her. To her they were all
specimens of the types she was at present interested in. For practical
reasons she was summing up English character with more deliberate
intention than she had felt in the years when she had gradually learned
to know Continental types and differentiate such peculiarities as were
significant of their ranks and nations. As the first Reuben Vanderpoel
had studied the countenances and indicative methods of the inhabitants
of the new parts of the country in which it was his intention to
do business, so the modernity of his descendant applied itself to
observation for reasons parallel in nature though not in actual kind.
As he had brought beads and firewater to bear as agents upon savages
who would barter for them skins and products which might be turned into
money, so she brought her nineteenth-century beauty, steadfastness of
purpose and alertness of brain to bear upon the matter the practical
dealing with which was the end she held in view. To bear herself in this
matter with as practical a control of situations as that with which
her great-grandfather would have borne himself in making a trade with a
previously unknown tribe of Indians was quite her intention, though it
had not occurred to her to put it to herself in any such form.
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