My amiable companion, however, did not take it amiss—she only laughed with me; and when we had recovered our gravity, she said, "So you find my cousin very ridiculous for throwing up the party?—un peu timide, peut-être?"
"Oh no!" I replied—"only a little hasty."
"Hasty!... Mais que voulez-vous? You do not seem to comprehend his embarrassment."
"Perhaps not fully; but I assure you his embarrassment would have ceased altogether, had he trusted himself with the young lady and her attendant groom: I doubt not that she would have led the way through one of our beautiful pheasant preserves, which are exceedingly well worth seeing; but most certainly she would have been greatly astonished, and much embarrassed in her turn, had your cousin taken it into his head to make love to her."
"You are in earnest?" said she, looking in my face with an air of great interest.
"Indeed I am," I replied; "I am very seriously in earnest; and though I know not the persons of whom we have been speaking, I can venture to assure you positively, that it was only because no gentleman so well recommended as your cousin could be suspected of abusing the confidence reposed in him, that this English father permitted him to accompany the young lady in her morning ride."
"C'est donc un trait sublime!" she exclaimed: "what noble confidence—what confiding honour! It is enough to remind one of the paladins of old."
"I suspect you are quizzing our confiding simplicity," said I; "but, at any rate, do not suspect me of quizzing you—for I have told you nothing more than a very simple and certain fact."
"I doubt it not the least in the world," she replied; "but you are indeed, as I observed at first, superiorly romantic." She appeared to meditate for a moment, and then added, "Mais dites moi un peu ... is not this a little inconsistent with the stories we read in the 'novels of fashionable life' respecting the manner in which husbands are acquired for the young ladies of England?... You refuse yourselves, you know, the privilege of disposing of your daughters in marriage according to the mutual interests of the parties; and therefore, as young ladies must be married, it follows that some other means must be resorted to by the parents. All Frenchmen know this, and they may perhaps for that reason be sometimes too easily induced to imagine that it is intended to lead them into marriage by captivating their senses. This is so natural an inference, that you really must forgive it."
"I forgive it perfectly," I replied; "but as we have agreed not to mystify each other, it would not be fair to leave you in the belief that it is the custom, in order to 'acquire' husbands for the young ladies, that they should be sent on love-making expeditions into the woods with the premier venu. But what you have said enables me to understand a passage which I was reading the other day in a French story, and which puzzled me most exceedingly. It was on the subject of a young girl who had been forsaken by her lover; and some one, reproaching him for his conduct, uses, I think, these words: 'Après l'avoir compromise autant qu'il est possible de compromettre une jeune miss—ce qui n'est pas une chose absolument facile dans la bienheureuse Albion....' This puzzled me more than I can express; because the fact is, that we consider the compromising the reputation of a young lady as so tremendous a thing, that excepting in novels, where neither national manners nor natural probabilities are permitted to check the necessary accumulation of misery on the head of a heroine, it NEVER occurs; and this, not because nothing can compromise her, but because nothing that can compromise her is ever permitted, or, I might almost say, ever attempted. Among the lower orders, indeed, stories of seduction are but too frequent; but our present examination of national manners refers only to the middle and higher classes of society."