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our heroine’s last position) she would impute to the young
American but a due consciousness of inequality.
Whatever Isabel might have made of her opportunities,
at all events, Henrietta Stackpole was by no means disposed
to neglect those in which she now found herself immersed.
‘Do you know you’re the first lord I’ve ever seen?’ she said
very promptly to her neighbour. ‘I suppose you think I’m
awfully benighted.’
‘You’ve escaped seeing some very ugly men,’ Lord War-
burton answered, looking a trifle absently about the table.
‘Are they very ugly? They try to make us believe in Amer-
ica that they’re all handsome and magnificent and that they
wear wonderful robes and crowns.’
‘Ah, the robes and crowns are gone out of fashion,’ said
Lord Warburton, ‘like your tomahawks and revolvers.’
‘I’m sorry for that; I think an aristocracy ought to be
splendid,’ Henrietta declared. ‘If it’s not that, what is it?’
‘Oh, you know, it isn’t much, at the best,’ her neighbour
allowed. ‘Won’t you have a potato?’
‘I don’t care much for these European potatoes. I shouldn’t
know you from an ordinary American gentleman.’
‘Do talk to me as if I were one,’ said Lord Warburton. ‘I
don’t see how you manage to get on without potatoes; you
must find so few things to eat over here.’
Henrietta was silent a little; there was a chance he was not
sincere. ‘I’ve had hardly any appetite since I’ve been here,’
she went on at last; ‘so it doesn’t much matter. I don’t ap-
prove of you, you know; I feel as if I ought to tell you that.’
‘Don’t approve of me?’

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