As the brougham drove down Bond Street, Betty called Lady Anstruthers' attention to more than one passer-by.
"Look, Rosy," she said."There is Mrs.Treat Hilyar in the second carriage to the right.You remember Josie Treat Hilyar married Lord Varick's son."In the landau designated an elderly woman with wonderfully-dressed white hair sat smiling and bowing to friends who were walking.Lady Anstruthers, despite her eagerness, shrank back a little, hoping to escape being seen.
"Oh, it is the Lows she is speaking to--Tom and Alice--Idid not know they had sailed yet."
The tall, well-groomed young man, with the nice, ugly face, was showing white teeth in a gay smile of recognition, and his pretty wife was lightly waving a slim hand in a grey suede glove.
"How cheerful and nice-tempered they look," said Rosy.
"Tom was only twenty when I saw him last.Whom did he marry?""An English girl.Such a love.A Devonshire gentleman's daughter.In New York his friends called her Devonshire Cream and Roses.She is one of the pretty, flushy, pink ones.""How nice Bond Street is on a spring morning like this,"said Lady Anstruthers."You may laugh at me for saying it, Betty, but somehow it seems to me more spring-like than the country.""How clever of you!" laughed Betty."There is so much truth in it." The people walking in the sunshine were all full of spring thoughts and plans.The colours they wore, the flowers in the women's hats and the men's buttonholes belonged to the season.The cheerful crowds of people and carriages had a sort of rushing stir of movement which suggested freshness.
Later in the year everything looks more tired.Now things were beginning and everyone was rather inclined to believe that this year would be better than last."Look at the shop windows, said Betty, "full of whites and pinks and yellows and blues--the colours of hyacinth and daffodil beds.It seems as if they insist that there never has been a winter and never will be one.They insist that there never was and never will be anything but spring.""It's in the air." Lady Anstruthers' sigh was actually a happy one."It is just what I used to feel in April when we drove down Fifth Avenue."Among the crowds of freshly-dressed passers-by, women with flowery hats and light frocks and parasols, men with touches of flower-colour on the lapels of their coats, and the holiday look in their faces, she noted so many of a familiar type that she began to look for and try to pick them out with quite excited interest.
"I believe that woman is an American," she would say.
"That girl looks as if she were a New Yorker," again."That man's face looks as if it belonged to Broadway.Oh, Betty! do you think I am right? I should say those girls getting out of the hansom to go into Burnham & Staples' came from out West and are going to buy thousands of things.Don't they look like it?"She began to lean forward and look on at things with an interest so unlike her Stornham listlessness that Betty's heart was moved.
Her face looked alive, and little waves of colour rose under her skin.Several times she laughed the natural little laugh of her girlhood which it had seemed almost too much to expect to hear again.The first of these laughs came when she counted her tenth American, a tall Westerner of the cartoon type, sauntering along with an expression of speculative enjoyment on his odd face, and evidently, though furtively, chewing tobacco.
"I absolutely love him, Betty," she cried."You couldn't mistake him for anything else.""No," answered Betty, feeling that she loved him herself, "not if you found him embalmed in the Pyramids."They pleased themselves immensely, trying to guess what he would buy and take home to his wife and girls in his Western town--though Western towns were very grand and amazing in these days, Betty explained, and knew they could give points to New York.He would not buy the things he would have bought fifteen years ago.Perhaps, in fact, his wife and daughters had come with him to London and stayed at the Metropole or the Savoy, and were at this moment being fitted by tailors and modistes patronised by Royalty.
"Rosy, look! Do you see who that is? Do you recognise her? It is Mrs.Bellingham.She was little Mina Thalberg.
She married Captain Bellingham.He was quite poor, but very well born--a nephew of Lord Dunholm's.He could not have married a poor girl--but they have been so happy together that Mina is growing fat, and spends her days in taking reducing treatments.She says she wouldn't care in the least, but Dicky fell in love with her waist and shoulder line."The plump, pretty young woman getting out of her victoria before a fashionable hairdresser's looked radiant enough.She had not yet lost the waist and shoulder line, though her pink frock fitted her with discreet tightness.She paused a moment to pat and fuss prettily over the two blooming, curly children who were to remain under the care of the nurse, who sat on the back seat, holding the baby on her lap.