"Don't you mind them, dear," Mrs. Temple cooed. She was a little, apple-faced woman, with a figure suggestive of a tea-cozy, and a voice with a gurgle in it, like a dove's. A nervous, convulsive moment of her pursed-up little mouth made that organ an uncertain element in her physiognomy, shifting as it did from one side of her face to the other with the rapidity of an aurora borealis. "Don't mind them, dear. A woman can never do more than reflect 'broken lights' of her husband, when she has a good one. Don't you love that expression?—'broken lights'? 'We are but broken lights of Thee!' Dear Tennyson! And no word yet from Madame de Melcourt."
"I don't expect any now," Olivia explained. "If Aunt Vic had meant to write she would have done it long ago. I'm afraid I've offended her past forgiveness."
She held her head slightly to one side, smiling with an air of mock penitence.
"Dear, dear!" Mrs. Temple murmured, sympathetically. "Just because you wouldn't marry a Frenchman!"
"And a little because I'm going to marry an Englishman. To Aunt Vic all Englishmen are grocers."
"Horrid old thing!" Drusilla said, indignantly.
"It's because she doesn't know them, of course," Olivia went on. "It's one of the things I never can understand—how people can generalize about a whole nation because they happen to dislike one or two individuals. As a matter of fact, Aunt Vic has become so absorbed in her little circle of old French royalist noblesse that she can't see anything to admire outside the rue de l'Université and château life in Normandy. She does admit that there's an element of homespun virtue in the old families of Boston and Waverton; but that's only because she belongs to them herself."
"The capacity of the American woman for being domesticated in an alien environment," observed Rodney Temple, "is only equaled by the dog's."
"We're nomadic, father," Drusilla asserted, "and migratory. We've always been so. It's because we're Saxons and Angles and Celts and Normans, and—"
"Saxon and Norman and Dane are we," Mrs. Temple quoted, gently.