“I’ve heard of her. You know, I’ve not been there longer than a week at a time for fifteen years.” Sidney put on his extreme imitation-English air. “I loathe the place. They don’t know how to treat a gentleman. And the lower classes!” He lifted his eyebrows and shook his head. He was at his most energetic when, in running down his native land to his English acquaintances, he reached the American “lower classes.”
Evelyn concealed the satire which longed to express itself in her face. She despised Sidney and all the Anglicised Americans; and, behind their backs, she and her friends derided them--perhaps to repay themselves for the humiliation of accepting hospitalities and even more concrete favours from “those American bounders.” The story among Sidney’s upper-class English tolerators was that his father had kept a low public house in New York or San Francisco, or “somewhere over there”--they were as ignorant of the geography of the United States as they were of the geography of Patagonia.
“So he’s to marry Dowie’s daughter?” continued Sidney. “He was brakeman on a railway thirty years ago.”
“How you Americans do jump about!” said Evelyn, forgetting that Sidney prided himself on no longer being an American. “He must be clever.”
“A clever rascal, probably,” replied Sidney spitefully. “Over here he’d have been put into jail for what they honour him for over there.”
“We’ve many of the same sort, no doubt,” said Evelyn, thinking it tactful to hold aloof when a son was abusing his mother.
“Yes, but usually they’re gentlemen and do things in a gentlemanly way.”
“Just now he is--they say.” Sidney had the rich man’s weakness for denying, or at least casting doubt upon, the riches of other rich men. He knew that his was the finest and most valuable wealth in the world, and he would have liked to believe that it was the only wealth in the world. “I trust the Duke has looked sharp to the settlements.”
“Why?” asked Evelyn, preparing to make mental notes.
“He may never get anything but what’s settled on him and her now. Dowie is more or less of a speculator and may go broke. But that’s not the only danger in marrying an American heiress. You see, Lady Evelyn, over there they have the vulgarest possible notions of rank and titles. And often, if there isn’t a cash settlement when they ‘buy the title,’ as they describe it, they refuse to give up anything. Many of their rich men have the craze for founding colleges and asylums and libraries. They reason that they’ve got the title in the family, therefore it isn’t necessary to pay for it; and so they leave all their money to build themselves a monument. Dishonourable, isn’t it? But they stop at nothing.”