He said nothing afterwards, except on Vane's departure. Then he pressed his hand: "Ah, consider, my child. A young girl of the most charming--of the _most_ charming--and two hundred thousand livres of _dot_!" Vane could only press his hand in return. And the last he saw of the doctor, he was standing still upon the Dieppe pier, rubbing his nose with an immense silk pocket-handkerchief. This was Vane's fifth trip across the Atlantic; and for the first time, he felt glad when the vessel's prow turned westward. Brittany, for him, represented the past; America the future. He was an American, after all. A day after his arrival he would be immersed in Wall Street--up in all the mysteries of exchange and rates, the stock-list his breviary and the ribbon of telegraph paper his oracle. Meanwhile, however, he dozed on the deck and essayed metrical translations of Boccaccio. He was reading the tale of the pot of basil one day, and thought for about half a morning of Miss Thomas. What she had to do with his reading, he could not see. But she was quite the most interesting figure in his mental gallery. A curious jumble was this modern state of society. Bare flowers sprang up in strange parterres; exotics grew outside of hot-houses, and common whiteweed inside. There ought to be some method of social transplanting; some way of grafting new blossoms on an old stock. But all American stock was good; American society was like a world of rounded pebbles grating on a beach; the buried pebbles were quite as fine as those on top; only these were more stirred and polished, so their colors came out best. And yet what common, poor stuff most of them were, after all! A pleasant trade, that of social lapidary! And Vane, perhaps for the first time, took note of the women around him. There was a Philadelphia girl, pretty and voluble; there was a young lady from Michigan, who had been to "college" in Massachusetts and finished herself abroad, alone, or in company with a dear friend from Connecticut. There was a girl from Cleveland, wealthy, marvellous, indescribable; and a young lady from New Orleans, with all the fire drawn from her cheeks into her eyes. There was a girl--a young woman, a young lady--a being feminine, from Boston, weighing and analyzing all things within her somewhat narrow mental horizon; and a social entity from New York, also of the feminine variety, but of orbit predicable and conventional eccentricities, her life a function of two variables, money and fashion. All these women were fair, and strange to him; and this, perhaps, was the only day of his life that he had definitely considered women from a contemporary point of view. His assured income was now eight thousand a year. Four of this went to his mother, three he spent; the rest he saved.