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Eve, who had ever a short memory, does not remember the catastrophe. She was three at the time of it. She was in the nursery when the blow fell, and presently her mother came in looking very distracted and wild, and caught the little girl’s face between her hands, and looked into it, and turned it this way and that, and passed the little girl’s beautiful brown hair through her fingers, and then began to speak violently.

“You sha’n’t be shabby,” she said. “I will make a great beauty of you. You’ve got the beauty. You shall ride in your carriage, even if I work my hands to the bone. They’ve bowled me over. But I’m not dead yet. Elizabeth Burton shall have her day. You wait. I’ll make the world dance for you.” Then she went into violent hysterics.

There was a little money left. Mrs. Burton took Evelyn to Europe, and began to teach her the long litany of success:

Money is God;
We praise thee, etc.,

a very long, somewhat truthful, and truly degraded litany. She taught her that it isn’t handsome is as handsome does, but the boots and shoes, after all. She taught her that a girl must dress beautifully to be beautiful, that she must learn all the world’s ways and secrets, and at the same time appear in speech and manner like a child of Nature, like a newly opened rose. And she taught her to love her country like this:

“America, my dear, is the one place where a girl can marry enough money to live somewhere else. Or, if her husband is tied to his affairs, it is the one place where she can get the most for his money–not as we get the most for ours, for we couldn’t live two minutes on our income in America–but where the most people will bow the lowest to her because she is rich; where she will be the most courted and the most envied.”

The two mammas worked along similar lines, but for different reasons. Mrs. Burton strove to make Eve ornamental so that she might acquire millions; Mrs. Williams strove to Anglicize and Europeanize her son so that he might ornament those which were already his. Those little spread eagles, the corpuscles in his blood, folded their wings a trifle as he grew older, and weren’t always so ready to scream and boast; but they remained eagles, and no amount of Eton and Oxford could turn them into little unicorns or lions. You may wonder why Fitz’s father, a strong, sane man, permitted such attempts at denationalization upon his son and heir. Fitz so wondered–once. So wrote. And was answered thus:

… If you’re any good it will all come out in the wash. If you aren’t any good it doesn’t matter whether your mother makes an Englishman out of you or a Mandarin. When you come of age you’ll be your own man; that’s been the bargain between your mother and me. That will be the time for you to decide whether to be governed or to help govern. I am not afraid for you. I never have been.

So Mrs. Williams was not successful on the whole in her attempts to make a cosmopolitan of Fitz. And that was just enough, because the attempts were those of an amateur. She had lived a furiously active life of pleasure; she had made an unassailable place for herself in the best European society, as at home. She had not even become estranged from her husband. They were always crossing the ocean to see each other, “if only for a minute or two,” as she used to say, and when Fitz was at school she spent much of her time in America; and Fitz’s short vacations were wild sprees with his father and mother, come over for the purpose. Mr. Williams would take an immense country house for a few weeks, with shooting and riding and all sorts of games thrown in, and have Fitz’s friends by the dozen. But, like as not, Mr. Williams would leave in the middle of it, as fast as trains and steamers could carry him, home to his affairs. And even the little English boys missed him sorely, since he was much kinder to them, as a rule, than their own fathers were, and had always too many sovereigns in his pocket for his own comfort.