I said, “Any girl would.”
“Possibly. I can’t help wondering what held good instead of the fur-and-feathers edict in the days when they composed——What I was going to say,” he broke off quickly, “was that I always imagined that young French girls were brought up to be more strict in these matters than English ones. Yet I know a French girl—”
(Surprising! He knows a girl!)
—“her father’s an old business acquaintance of mine—”
(Ah, that explains it.)
—“and neither her father nor the young lady seemed to find anything curious about the matter, when, in payment of some bet made at a flying-meeting, I bought her quite a large boxful of pairs of gloves.”
“Oh, gloves! Anybody can give gloves to anybody,” I told him. “Gloves aren’t like clothes.”
“No, but I see some clothes about nowadays that are uncommonly like gloves!”
Could it have been the Governor who muttered this sotto voce to himself?