"I guess not. Lead's a feather to them for weight. But it's a good thing to have respectable friends, especially in this slow coach of an old country, where you size everybody up by the company they keep."
"Ah!" said Lucian pointedly and—it must be confessed—rather rudely, "so you have found the necessity of having respectable friends, however dull?"
"That's a fact," acknowledged Mrs. Vrain candidly. "I've had a queer sort of life with poppa—ups and downs, and flyings over the moon, I guess."
"You are not American?" said Denzil suddenly.
"Sakes! How do you figure that out?"
"Because you are too pronouncedly Amurrican to be American."
"That's an epigram with some truth in it," replied Lydia coolly. "Oh, I'm as much a U. S. A. article as anything else. We hung out our shingle in Wyoming, Wis., for a considerable time, and a girl who tickets herself Yankee this side flies high. But I guess I'm not going to give you my history," concluded Mrs. Vrain drily. "I'm not a Popey nor you a confessor."
"H'm! You've been in the South Seas, I see."
"There's no telling. How do you know?"
"The natives there use the word Popey to designate a Roman Catholic."