“Then I wish we might have breakfast, as I have promised to call upon a young lady at one.”
“Don’t you get yourself into a scrape, Charles.”
“Don’t you be concerned about me,” replied Charles; “I have lived too long in Paris to be easily taken in.”
“But our women are not like the French.”
“That’s one reason why I don’t like them. Their everlasting pretensions, their air of superiority, and, above all, that imperious spirit which receives all our petits soins as a mere tribute which is due to them, have often completely disgusted me. I like to be at my ease with a woman; it’s so much more natural.”
“You are not singular in that,” remarked the gentleman from New York; “I have had the same taste ever since I was a boy of sixteen.”
“What! without having been in Europe?”
“Certainly; but then I was brought up in New York, which, you know, is a little Europe of itself. I have heard Frenchmen say, that, next to Paris, there is nothing like it in the world.”
“Pooh!” cried the Bostonian, “I’d rather live in Boston ten times over; and so would you, if you knew it as well as I do; but that, you know, takes time.”
“Don’t talk to me about Boston,” said the Philadelphian; “your women don’t even know how to dress.”