She looked at him hardly. "And what has it all got to do with me?"
He looked at her steadily in his turn. "I thought perhaps you wouldn't care to live in debt to me, either."
She was startled. "Who? I? En voilà une idée!"
"I thought," he went on, "that possibly the Guion sense of family honor—"
"Fiddle-faddle! There's no sense of family honor among Americans. There can't be. You can only have family honor where, as with us, the family is the unit; whereas, with you, the unit is the individual. The American individual may have a sense of honor; but the American family is only a disintegrated mush. What you really thought was that you might get your money back."
"If you like, madame. That's another way of putting it. If the family paid me, Miss Guion would feel quite differently—and so would Colonel Ashley."
"When you say the family," she sniffed, "you mean me."
"In the sense that I naturally think first of its most distinguished member. And, of course, the greater the distinction the greater must be—shall I call it the indignity?—of living under an obligation—"
"Am I to understand that you put up this money—that's your American term, isn't it?—that you put up this money in the expectation that I would pay you back?"
"Not exactly. I put up the money, in the first place, to save the credit of the Guion name, and with the intention, if you didn't pay me back, to do without it."