“I don’t see why it isn’t. You’ve met her and talked with her. What do you think of her?”
“Ken, she is one individual, and I can tell you what I think about her ... but that doesn’t make her stand for the whole code of ethics. The other thousands of girls may not be like Andree at all—they may be bad. Don’t you see? It comes down to a matter of personal, concrete experience again.... But Andree....” She looked at him gravely. “I should hate to feel that I had broken faith with Andree or been unfair to her or caused her grief. She is very sweet and childlike—and good. She has no consciousness of having been other than virtuous because she has loved you.... I had lunch with her the other day. It was the first time I had ever lunched with a woman whom I knew to be violating our standard ... and it didn’t hurt me in the least. I felt no repulsion or disgust ... but that was because I couldn’t help feeling that she was good....”
“Then you think—”
“I think this: that all of us come to fit into our environment very readily. We come over here, and soon we are being absorbed by the things around us.... Presently we will go home, more or less in the frame of mind created by Paris ... and then the environment of home will begin to work. In no time at all we will have adjusted ourselves again and Paris will be almost as if it never had been.... I believe that is exactly what will happen. If we stayed here we should become as nearly Parisian as we could be made, but, going home, Paris will very rapidly be eradicated.”
“And all that has happened here?”
“Will be part of a memory—something in a dream.”
He shook his head. “I can’t believe that. I know I shall never be just the same as I was before. I see your point of view, but it doesn’t help me ... and I don’t believe you are right.”
“You don’t want to believe it.”
“I know—Andree makes all the difference. If you were a man and there had been an Andree you would have felt as I have. Somehow France means Andree to me. I never dreamed of any one like her. You don’t know her—what a quaint, childlike, womanly, fairy kind of a girl she is. When I think of her she doesn’t seem real, but like some mysterious being out of a magical country who has come to visit for a little while—to make me happy.... She does come from a mysterious country. Do you know that I don’t know her name—just Andree? I have never asked. I don’t know where she lives or how she lives. I don’t know anything about her except that she appears and is with me a little while—and then disappears again.... That has made a difference—that quality.”
“I would hardly have suspected you of being so romantic.”