English country-house in a northern county, where a life as
monotonous and self-contained as his own was chequered and
dispersed had gone on for generation after generation; and it
was the sense of that house, and of all it typified even to his
vagrancy and irreverence, which, coming out now and then in his
talk, or in his attitude toward something or somebody, gave him
a firmer outline and a steadier footing than the other
marionettes in the dance. Superficially so like them all, and
so eager to outdo them in detachment and adaptability,
ridiculing the prejudices he had shaken off, and the people to
whom he belonged, he still kept, under his easy pliancy, the
skeleton of old faiths and old fashions. "He talks every
language as well as the rest of us," Susy had once said of him,
"but at least he talks one language better than the others"; and
Strefford, told of the remark, had laughed, called her an idiot,
and been pleased.

As he shambled up the stairs with her, arm in arm, she was
thinking of this quality with a new appreciation of its value.
Even she and Lansing, in spite of their unmixed Americanism,
their substantial background of old-fashioned cousinships in New
York and Philadelphia, were as mentally detached, as universally
at home, as touts at an International Exhibition. If they were
usually recognized as Americans it was only because they spoke
French so well, and because Nick was too fair to be "foreign,"
and too sharp-featured to be English. But Charlie Strefford was
English with all the strength of an inveterate habit; and
something in Susy was slowly waking to a sense of the beauty of
habit.