Marie Louise was American-born herself, and humbly born, at that, but she liked extreme Americanism never the more. Perhaps she was a bit of a snob, though fate was getting ready to beat the snobbery out of her. And hers was an unintentional, superficial snobbery, at worst. Some people said she was affected and that she aped the swagger dialect. But she had a habit of taking on the accent and color of her environments. She had not been in England a month before she spoke Piccadilly almost impeccably. She had caught French and German intonations with equal speed and had picked up music by ear with the same amazing facility in the days when certain kinds of music were her livelihood. In one respect her Englishness of accent was less an imitation or an affectation than a certain form of politeness and modesty. When an Englishwoman said, "Cahn't you?" it seemed tactless to answer, "No, I cann't." To respond to "Good mawning" with "Good morrning" had the effect of a contradiction or a correction. She had none of the shibboleth spirit that leads certain people to die or slay for a pronunciation. The pronunciation of the people she was talking to was good enough for her. She conformed also because she hated to see people listening less to what she said than to the Yankee way she said it. This man Davidge had a superb brow and a look of success, but he bored her before he reached her. She made ready for flight to some other group. Then he startled her--by being startled as he caught sight of her. When Lady Webling transmitted him with a murmur of his name and a tender, "My daughter," Davidge stopped short and mumbled: "I've had the pleasure of meeting you before, somewhere, haven't I?" Marie Louise snubbed him flatly. "I think not." He took the slap with a smile. "Did I hear Lady Webling call you her daughter?" Marie Louise did not explain, but answered, curtly, "Yes," with the aristocratic English parsimony that makes it almost "Yis." "Then you're right and I'm wrong. I beg your pardon." "Daon't mention it," said Marie Louise, and drew closer to Lady Webling and the oncoming guest. She had the decency to reproach herself for being beastly to the stranger, but his name slipped at once through the sieve of her memory. Destiny is the grandiose title we give to the grand total of a long column of accidents when we stop to tot up the figures. So we wait till that strange sum of accidents which we call a baby is added up into a living child of determined sex before we fasten a name that changes an it to a him or a her. The accidents that result in a love-affair, too, we look back on and outline into a definite road, and we call that Fate. We are great for giving names to selected fragments of the chaos of life.