When in her eighteenth year her parents came for the first time to England, she could only see in them strangers, and strangers who, alas! had nothing of that attraction which bridges the distance between age and youth. If what she felt on meeting them was an agony of disappointment and a sense of shame, more acute because it was shut close in her own breast, they were themselves not less chagrined. When they first saw her, her parents both thought that she did not give them great results for the vast sums they had spent on her, and that really they would have turned her out smarter if they had had her brought up in New York. The art of gilding gold and painting lilies is at its perihelion in the empire city. He especially was disappointed in her at first; he had expected her to make more show, to have more color, to be more swagger, as the slang words ran; this tall, proud, slender young woman, who wore generally black or grey in the day, and white in the evening, and put on no jewelry of any kind, seemed to him to give him poor value for the many thousand of dollars he had spent on her. He had intended her to be ultra fashionable, ultra chic, always in the swim, always in the first flight; on race-courses, on yacht decks, on the box seat of drags, at aristocratic river clubs, at exclusive and crowded little suppers after theatres. “I wanted a gal of fashion, not a school-marm!” he said with much disgust, when the lady who had brought her up told him that she was the finest Hellenist of her sex. He did not know what a Hellenist was, but he understood that it was something connected with teaching. What he wanted was something very showy, very sensational, very superfine. But Katherine did not like fashionable life at all. A very little of it wearied her. She did not like a man to lean his elbows on a little, round, _tête-à-tête_ supper-table, and stare at her, with his eyes within six inches of her necklace, and his champagne and cigar-scented breath hot in her face; and she did not think the situation made more agreeable by the fact that the starer was illustrious. She infinitely preferred to be alone in the music-room with her violin and harmonium, or in the library comparing Jowett’s Dialogues with the original. It is easy to understand that she was a great disappointment to her father, though a sort of sullen pride in her was wrung out of him when he saw how indifferent she appeared to the great folks he adored, yet at the same time how at home she seemed in the mystic arena of that society which made him shake in his shoes, strong, hard, shrewd man though he was.