Mrs. Burton had made a failure of her own life.

She had married a man who subsequently had been so foolish as to lose his money—or most of it.

Eve, who had ever a short memory, does not remember the catastrophe. She was three at the time of it. She was in the nursery when the blow fell, and presently her mother came in looking very distracted and wild, and caught the little girl's face between her hands, and looked into it, and turned it this way and that, and passed the little girl's beautiful brown hair through her fingers, and then began to speak violently.

"You sha'n't be shabby," she said. "I will make a great beauty of you. You've got the beauty. You shall ride in your carriage, even if I work my hands to the bone. They've bowled me over. But I'm not dead yet. Elizabeth Burton shall have her day. You wait. I'll make the world dance for you." Then she went into violent hysterics.

There was a little money left. Mrs. Burton took Evelyn to Europe, and began to teach her the long litany of success:

Money is God;
We praise thee, etc.,

a very long, somewhat truthful, and truly degraded litany. She taught her that it isn't handsome is as handsome does, but the boots and shoes, after all. She taught her that a girl must dress beautifully to be beautiful, that she must learn all the world's ways and secrets, and at the same time appear in speech and manner like a child of Nature, like a newly opened rose. And she taught her to love her country like this:

"America, my dear, is the one place where a girl can marry enough money to live somewhere else. Or, if her husband is tied to his affairs, it is the one place where she can get the most for his money—not as we get the most for ours, for we couldn't live two minutes on our income in America—but where the most people will bow the lowest to her because she is rich; where she will be the most courted and the most envied."

The two mammas worked along similar lines, but for different reasons. Mrs. Burton strove to make Eve ornamental so that she might acquire millions; Mrs. Williams strove to Anglicize and Europeanize her son so that he might ornament those which were already his. Those little spread eagles, the corpuscles in his blood, folded their wings a trifle as he grew older, and weren't always so ready to scream and boast; but they remained eagles, and no amount of Eton and Oxford could turn them into little unicorns or lions. You may wonder why Fitz's father, a strong, sane man, permitted such attempts at denationalization upon his son and heir. Fitz so wondered—once. So wrote. And was answered thus:

… If you're any good it will all come out in the wash. If you aren't any good it doesn't matter whether your mother makes an Englishman out of you or a Mandarin. When you come of age you'll be your own man; that's been the bargain between your mother and me. That will be the time for you to decide whether to be governed or to help govern. I am not afraid for you. I never have been.

So Mrs. Williams was not successful on the whole in her attempts to make a cosmopolitan of Fitz. And that was just enough, because the attempts were those of an amateur. She had lived a furiously active life of pleasure; she had made an unassailable place for herself in the best European society, as at home. She had not even become estranged from her husband. They were always crossing the ocean to see each other, "if only for a minute or two," as she used to say, and when Fitz was at school she spent much of her time in America; and Fitz's short vacations were wild sprees with his father and mother, come over for the purpose. Mr. Williams would take an immense country house for a few weeks, with shooting and riding and all sorts of games thrown in, and have Fitz's friends by the dozen. But, like as not, Mr. Williams would leave in the middle of it, as fast as trains and steamers could carry him, home to his affairs. And even the little English boys missed him sorely, since he was much kinder to them, as a rule, than their own fathers were, and had always too many sovereigns in his pocket for his own comfort.

But Mrs. Burton's attempts to make a charming cosmopolitan of Eve met with the greater success that they deserved. They were the efforts of a professional, one who had staked life or death, so to speak, on the result. Where Mrs. Williams amused herself and achieved small victories, Mrs. Burton fought and achieved great conquests. She saved money out of her thin income, money for the great days to come when Eve was to be presented to society at Newport; and she slaved and toiled grimly and with far-seeing genius. Eve's speaking voice was, perhaps, Mrs. Burton's and her own greatest triumph. It was Ellen Terry's youngest, freshest voice over again, but with the naÏvest little ghost of a French accent; and she didn't seem so much to project a phrase at you by the locutory muscles as to smile it to you.

Mrs. Burton had, of course, her moments of despair about Eve. But these were mostly confined to that despairing period when most girls are nothing but arms and wrists and gawkiness and shyness; when their clear, bright complexions turn muddy, and they want to enter convents. Eve at this period in her life was unusually trying and nondescript. She announced that if she ever married it would be for love alone, but that she did not intend to marry. She would train to be a cholera nurse or a bubonic plague nurse—anything, in short, that was most calculated to drive poor Mrs. Burton frantic. And she grew the longest, thinnest pair of legs and arms in Europe; and her hair seemed to lose its wonderful lustre; and her skin, upon which Mrs. Burton had banked so much, became colorless and opaque and a little blotched around the chin. And she was so nervous and overgrown that she would throw you a whole fit of hysterics during piano lessons; and she prayed so long night and morning that her bony knees developed callouses; and when she didn't have a cold in her head she was getting over one or catching another.

During this period in Eve's life the children met for the second time. It was in Vienna. This time Mrs. Burton, as having been longer in residence, called upon Mrs. Williams, taking Eve with her, after hesitation. Poor Eve! The graceful, gracious courtesy of her babyhood was now a performance of which a stork must have felt ashamed; she pitched into a table (while trying to make herself small) and sent a pitcher of lemonade crashing to the ground. And then burst into tears that threatened to become laughter mixed with howls.

At this moment Fitz, having been sent for to "do the polite," entered. He shook hands at once with Mrs. Burton, whom he had never seen before, and turned to see how Eve, whom he vaguely remembered, was coming on. And there she was—nothing left of his vague memory but the immense eyes. Even these were not clear and bright, but red in the whites and disordered with tears. For the rest (Fitz made the mental comparison himself) she reminded him of a silly baby camel that he had seen in the zoo, that had six inches of body, six feet of legs, and the most bashful expression imaginable.

Mrs. Burton, you may be sure, did not lose the start that Fitz gave before he went forward and shook hands with Eve. But she misinterpreted it. She said to herself (all the while saying other things aloud to Mrs. Williams): "If he had only seen her a year ago, even a boy of his age would have been struck by her, and would have remembered her. But now! Now, he'll never forget her. And I don't blame him. She's so ugly that he was frightened."

But that was not why Fitz had started. The poor, gawky, long-legged, tearful, frightened, overgrown, wretched girl had not struck him as ugly; she had struck him as the most pathetic and to-be-pitied object that he had ever seen. I do not account for this. I state it. Had she been pretty and self-possessed he would have left the room presently on some excuse, but now he stayed—not attracted, but troubled and sorry and eager to put her at her ease. So he would have turned aside to help a gutter cat that had been run over and hurt, though he would have passed the proudest, fluffiest Angora in Christendom with no more than a glance. He began to talk to her in his plainest, straightest, honestest Ohioan. It always came out strongest when he was most moved. His mother's sharp ears heard the A's, how they narrowed in his mouth, and smote every now and then with a homely tang against the base of his nose. "Just like his father," she thought, "when some one's in trouble." And she had a sudden twinge of nostalgia.

Fitz lured Eve to a far corner and showed her a set of wonderful carved chess-men that he had bought that morning; and photographs of his friends at Eton, and of the school, and of some of the masters. He talked very earnestly and elaborately about these dull matters, and passed by the opportunities which her first embarrassed replies offered for the repartee of youth. And he who was most impatient of restraint and simple occupations talked and behaved like a dull, simple, kindly old gentleman. His method may not have left Eve with a dazzling impression of him; she could not know that he was not himself, but all at once a deliberate artist seeking to soothe and to make easy.

Eve did not enjoy that call; she enjoyed nothing in those days but prayer and despair; but she got to the end of it without any more tears and crashes. And she said to her mother afterward that young Williams seemed a nice boy—but so dull. Well, they were quits. She had seemed dull enough to Fitz. A sick cat may touch your heart, but does not furnish you with lively companionship. Fitz was heartily glad when the Burtons had gone. He had worked very hard to make things possible for that absurd baby camel.

"You may call her an absurd baby camel," said his mother, "but it's my opinion that she is going to be a very great beauty."

"She!" exclaimed Fitz, thinking that the ugliness of Eve might have unhinged his mother's beauty-loving mind.

"Oh," said his mother, "she's at an age now—poor child! But don't you remember how the bones of her face—"

"I am trying to forget," said Fitz with a tremendous shudder for the occasion.