Bessie's Fortune

Here the lady paused for breath, and Augusta, whose face was very red, began to talk to Bessie of Wales and the wild, beautiful scenery. She was as well educated as most young ladies of her class, and was really a very pretty, lady-like girl, who expressed herself well and intelligently, and was evidently annoyed by her mother's manner of speaking, for she tried to keep the conversation in her own hands, and Bessie, who guessed her design, helped her to do so; and after a few moments Mrs. Browne arose to go, and, shaking out her silk flounces and pulling her hands to her ears to make sure her immense diamonds were not unclasped, because, as she said, she would not for a farm lose her solitarys, she said good-morning, and was driven away to see the elephant of Bangor and vicinity.

Bessie drew a long breath of relief as she saw the carriage leave the park, and said: "Oh, mother, how can you find pleasure in her society, and are the Americans generally like her?"

"Not half as good as she, some of them, though vastly more refined and better educated," Daisy replied, warming up in defense of the woman who was so kind to her, and whom she knew to be honest and true as steel. "There are plenty of ignorant, vulgar women in England, traveling on their money recently acquired, who at heart are not half as good as Mrs. Browne," she said; "and for that matter there are titled ladies too who know precious little more than she. Why, old Lady Oakley once sent me a note, in which more than half the words were misspelled, and her capitals were everywhere except in the right place; but she is my lady, and so it is all right. I tell you Bessie, there is, after all, but little difference between the English and the Americans, who, as a class, are better informed than we are and know ten times more about our country than we do about theirs."

Daisy grew very eloquent and earnest as she talked, but Bessie was not convinced, and felt a shrinking from Mrs. Rossiter-Browne as from something positively bad; and here she did the woman great injustice, for never was there a kinder, truer heart than Mrs. Browne's, and if, in her girlhood, she had possessed a tithe of her present fortune, she would have made a far different woman from what she was.

For a few days longer she staid at the "George," and astonished the guests with the richness of her toilets and the singularity of her speech, which was something wonderful to her hearers, who looked upon her as a specimen of Americans generally. But this she would not permit; and once, when she overheard the remark, "that's a fair sample of them, I suppose," turned fiercely on the knot of ladies who, she knew, were discussing her, and said: "If it's me you are talking up and think a fair sample let me tell you that you are much mistaken. I ain't a sample of nothin'. I am just myself, and Uncle Sam is not at all responsible for me, unless it is that he didn't give me a chance, when young, to go to school. I was poor, and had to work for my livin', and my old blind mother's, too. She is dead this many a year; but if she could of lived till now, when I have so much more than I know what to do with, I'd have dressed her up in silks and satins, and brought her over the seas and flouted her in your faces as another sample of your American cousins, who, take 'em by and large, are quite as refined as your English women, and enough sight better informed about everything. Why, only t'other day one of 'em asked me what language was generally spoken in New York city, and didn't a school-girl from Edinburgh ask Gusty if the people out West were not all heathens, and if Chicago was near Boston! I tell you, ladies, folks who live in glass houses should not throw stones. You are well enough, and nice enough, and on voices you beat us all holler, for 'tis a fact that most of us pitch ours too high and talk through our noses awful, and maybe you'd do that too, if you lived in our beastly climate, but as a rule you have not an atom more learning or refinement at heart than we."