What the people in the station saw, the guards and porters, the men in the book stalls, the travellers hurrying past, was a striking-looking girl, whose colouring and carriage made one turn to glance after her, and who, having bought some periodicals and papers, took her place in a first-class compartment4 and watched the passersby5 interestedly through the open window. Having been looked at and remarked on during her whole life, Bettina did not find it disturbing that more than one corduroy-clothed porter and fresh-coloured, elderly gentleman, or freshly attired6 young one, having caught a glimpse of her through her window, made it convenient to saunter past or hover7 round. She looked at them much more frankly8 than they looked at her. To her they were all specimens9 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 Continental10 types and differentiate11 such peculiarities12 as were significant of their ranks and nations. As the first Reuben Vanderpoel had studied the countenances13 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 applied14 itself to observation for reasons parallel in nature though not in actual kind. As he had brought beads15 and firewater to bear as agents upon savages16 who would barter17 for them skins and products which might be turned into money, so she brought her nineteenth-century beauty, steadfastness18 of purpose and alertness of brain to bear upon the matter the practical dealing19 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 previously20 unknown tribe of Indians was quite her intention, though it had not occurred to her to put it to herself in any such form. Still, whether she was aware of the fact or not, her point of view was exactly what the first Reuben Vanderpoel's had been on many very different occasions. She had before her the task of dealing with facts and factors of which at present she knew but little. Astuteness21 of perception, self-command, and adaptability22 were her chief resources. She was ready, either for calm, bold approach, or equally calm and wholly non-committal retreat.
The perceptions she had brought with her filled her journey into Kent with delicious things, delicious recognition of beauties she had before known the existence of only through the reading of books, and the dwelling23 upon their charms as reproduced, more or less perfectly24, on canvas. She saw roll by her, with the passing of the train, the loveliness of land and picturesqueness25 of living which she had saved for herself with epicurean intention for years. Her fancy, when detached from her thoughts of her sister, had been epicurean, and she had been quite aware that it was so. When she had left the suburbs and those villages already touched with suburbanity behind, she felt herself settle into a glow of luxurious27 enjoyment28 in the freshness of her pleasure in the familiar, and yet unfamiliar29, objects in the thick-hedged fields, whose broad-branched, thick-foliaged oaks and beeches30 were more embowering in their shade, and sweeter in their green than anything she remembered that other countries had offered her, even at their best. Within the fields the hawthorn31 hedges beautifully enclosed were groups of resigned mother sheep with their young lambs about them. The curious pointed32 tops of the red hopkilns, piercing the trees near the farmhouses33, wore an almost intentional34 air of adding picturesque26 detail. There were clusters of old buildings and dots of cottages and cottage gardens which made her now and then utter exclamations35 of delight. Little inarticulate Rosy36 had seen and felt it all twelve years before on her hopeless bridal home-coming when Nigel had sat huddled37 unbecomingly in the corner of the railway carriage. Her power of expression had been limited to little joyful38 gasps40 and obvious laudatory41 adjectives, smothered42 in their birth by her first glance at her bridegroom. Betty, in seeing it, knew all the exquisiteness43 of her own pleasure, and all the meanings of it.
Yes, it was England—England. It was the England of Constable44 and Morland, of Miss Mitford and Miss Austen, the Brontes and George Eliot. The land which softly rolled and clothed itself in the rich verdure of many trees, sometimes in lovely clusters, sometimes in covering copse, was Constable's; the ripe young woman with the fat-legged children and the farmyard beasts about her, as she fed the hens from the wooden piggin under her arm, was Morland's own. The village street might be Miss Mitford's, the well-to-do house Jane Austen's own fancy, in its warm brick and comfortable decorum. She laughed a little as she thought it.
“That is American,” she said, “the habit of comparing every stick and stone and breathing thing to some literary parallel. We almost invariably say that things remind us of pictures or books—most usually books. It seems a little crude, but perhaps it means that we are an intensely literary and artistic45 people.”
She continued to find comparisons revealing to her their appositeness, until her journey had ended by the train's slackening speed and coming to a standstill before the rural-looking little station which had presented its quaint46 aspect to Lady Anstruthers on her home-coming of years before.
It had not, during the years which certainly had given time for change, altered in the least. The station master had grown stouter47 and more rosy, and came forward with his respectful, hospitable48 air, to attend to the unusual-looking young lady, who was the only first-class passenger. He thought she must be a visitor expected at some country house, but none of the carriages, whose coachmen were his familiar acquaintances, were in waiting. That such a fine young lady should be paying a visit at any house whose owners did not send an equipage to attend her coming, struck him as unusual. The brougham from the “Crown,” though a decent country town vehicle, seemed inadequate49. Yet, there it stood drawn50 up outside the station, and she went to it with the manner of a young lady who had ordered its attendance and knew it would be there.
Wells felt a good deal of interest. Among the many young ladies who descended51 from the first-class compartments52 and passed through the little waiting-room on their way to the carriages of the gentry53 they were going to visit, he did not know when a young lady had “caught his eye,” so to speak, as this one did. She was not exactly the kind of young lady one would immediately class mentally as “a foreigner,” but the blue of her eyes was so deep, and her hair and eyelashes so dark, that these things, combining themselves with a certain “way” she had, made him feel her to be of a type unfamiliar to the region, at least.
He was struck, also, by the fact that the young lady had no maid with her. The truth was that Bettina had purposely left her maid in town. If awkward things occurred, the presence of an attendant would be a sort of complication. It was better, on the first approach, to be wholly unencumbered.
“How far are we from Stornham Court?” she inquired.
“Five miles, my lady,” he answered,
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