and when she came to an end of them, what then? Was this flight to
Paris a sign that she had come to an end--was she going to try Paris
because London had failed her? The time of year precluded such a
conjecture. Mrs. Newell's Paris was non-existent in September. The
town was a desert of gaping trippers--he could as soon think of her
seeking social restoration at Margate.

For a moment it occurred to him that she might have to come over to
replenish her wardrobe; but he knew her dates too well to dwell long
on this hope. It was in April and December that she visited the
dress-makers: before December, he had heard her explain, one got
nothing but "the American fashions." Mrs. Newell's scorn of all
things American was somewhat illogically coupled with the
determination to use her own Americanism to the utmost as a means of
social advance. She had found out long ago that, on certain lines,
it paid in London to be American, and she had manufactured for
herself a personality independent of geographical or social
demarcations, and presenting that remarkable blend of plantation
dialect, Bowery slang and hyperbolic statement, which is the British
nobility's favorite idea of an unadulterated Americanism. Mrs.
Newell, for all her talents, was not naturally either humorous or
hyperbolic, and there were times when it would doubtless have been a
relief to her to be as monumentally stolid as some of the persons
whose dulness it was her fate to enliven. It was perhaps the need of
relaxing which had drawn her into her odd intimacy with Garnett,
with whom she did not have to be either scrupulously English or
artificially American, since the impression she made on him was of
no more consequence than that which she produced on her footman.
Garnett was perfectly aware that he owed his success to his
insignificance, but the fact affected him only as adding one more