"How am I mistaken about him?" asked Grafton. "I am very English, you know. We have our own ideas about married life. I needn't defend them, but I think they're the best there are. They're different from the French ideas. They're different from your son's ideas. He made that plain, or we shouldn't have parted as we did."
"Well, I am glad you have put it in that direct way," she said. "I have a great deal of sympathy with your ideas; they're not so different from those in which I was brought up. I wasn't brought to Europe to marry a title, as some of our girls are. It was a chance I did so. I was in love with my husband, and my married life was all I could wish for, as long as it lasted. It would be the same, I feel sure, with your daughter."
Grafton smiled at her. "If we are to talk quite directly," he said "—and it's no good talking at all if we don't—I must say that, as far as I can judge, American women are more adaptable than English. They adapt themselves here to our ideas, when they marry Englishmen, and they adapt themselves to Frenchmen, whose ways are different from ours. I don't think an English girl could adapt herself to certain things that are taken for granted in France. I don't think that a girl like mine should be asked to. She wouldn't be prepared for it. It would be a great shock to her if it happened. She would certainly have a right to blame her father if she were made unhappy by it. I don't want my daughters to blame me for anything."
She had kept her eyes steadily fixed on him. "Well, Mr. Grafton," she said, "we won't run away from anything. Can you say of any man, French or English or American, who is rich and lives a life chiefly to amuse himself, that he is always going to remain faithful to his wife? How many young Englishmen of the type that you would be pleased to marry your daughter to could you say it of, for certain?"
"Of a good many. And I should say there wasn't one who wouldn't intend to keep absolutely straight when he fell in love with a girl and wanted to marry her. If he wasn't like that, I think one would know, and feel exactly the same objection as I must admit I feel towards your son."
"Oh, but you do mistake him. It was because you doubted him that he took such offence. As he said to me, it was like saying that your own daughter was not worthy to be loved for all her life."
Grafton felt a sudden spurt of resentment. His voice was not so level as usual as he said: "It's easy enough to put it in that way. He said much the same to me. Of course she's worthy to be loved all her life. Would you guarantee that she always would be?"
There was the merest flicker of her eyelids before she replied: "How could one guarantee any such thing for any man, even for one's own son? All I can tell you is that he will make her a devoted husband, and her chances of happiness are as great with him as if he were an Englishman. I won't say that he has never loved another woman. That would be absurd. What I can say is that he does love no one else, and that he loves her in such a way as to put the thought of other women out of his mind. That is exactly what love that leads to marriage should be, in my opinion. Don't you agree with me, Mr. Grafton?"
"Yes," he said. "It ought to do that."
"And if it does, what more have you a right to ask? Our men are chivalrous. The very fact of his marrying an innocent English girl, who would be hurt by what she had had no experience of would act with my son—or I should think with any gentleman."