Sybil drew her cloak round her.
'No, certainly not,' said she. 'Judy told me you lived in a summer-house. Well, I did not come down here to see you through the window; lead on to the summer-house.'
'It will be too cold for you,' said he.
'It will be nothing of the kind.'
They talked till dinner on indifferent subjects; she sketched New York for him with a brilliant, if not a very flattering, touch; she did her best for the Revels, but suddenly in the middle broke down.
'It really is awful what a beast one is!' she said. 'But there, somehow, where what I am describing to you is natural, where everyone is so extraordinarily kind and so entirely uncultured, the vulgarity did not strike me. I like the people, and, as you know, I like the sense of wealth. Who is it who talks about moral geography? Burke, I think. Well, that is a very suggestive expression. You can do in New York what you cannot possibly conceive doing in England, just as you can grow plants in the South which will not stand our climate.'
Charlie shook his head.
'I don't think I could stand that anywhere,' he said.
'Oh yes, you could. Milieu, environment is everything; but now, as I sit here and look at the big trees in the garden, covered with that wash of moonlight, it is different. You too—you are so very un-American. I always told you you were old-fashioned.'
Charlie looked at her in silence a moment.