founded on their impression that magnificent Indian chieftains in
blankets and feathers stalked about the streets of the towns, and
that Betty's own thick black hair had been handed down to her by some
beautiful Minnehaha or Pocahontas. When first she was approached by
timid, tentative questionings revealing this point of view, Betty felt
hot and answered with unamiable curtness. No, there were no red Indians
in New York. There had been no red Indians in her family. She had
neither grandmothers nor aunts who were squaws, if they meant that.

She felt so scornfully, so disgustedly indignant at their benighted
ignorance, that she knew she behaved very well in saying so little in
reply. She could have said so much, but whatsoever she had said would
have conveyed nothing to them, so she thought it all out alone. She
went over the whole ground and little realised how much she was teaching
herself as she turned and tossed in her narrow, spotlessly white bed at
night, arguing, comparing, drawing deductions from what she knew and
did not know of the two continents. Her childish anger, combining
itself with the practical, alert brain of Reuben Vanderpoel the first,
developed in her a logical reasoning power which led her to arrive at
many an excellent and curiously mature conclusion. The result was
finely educational. All the more so that in her fevered desire for
justification of the things she loved, she began to read books such as
little girls do not usually take interest in. She found some difficulty
in obtaining them at first, but a letter or two written to her father
obtained for her permission to read what she chose. The third Reuben
Vanderpoel was deeply fond of his younger daughter, and felt in secret
a profound admiration for her, which was saved from becoming too obvious
by the ever present American sense of humour.

"Betty seems to be going in for politics," he said after reading the