“If these ladies had not kept me going, I should have done so too.”
“That’s the pleasure of courting,” said Jim tauntingly.
“Why, a man has to come to it some time or other,” said John.
“Miss *** is certainly a pretty girl; but, if I were in your place, I should not like her flirting in Washington. Washington is the worst place for a young lady in the United States. It is altogether too European.”
“I do not like it myself,” observed the Southerner; “nor the custom of our fashionable women to bring their daughters here just as they have left the boarding-school, in order to introduce them to the beau monde.”
“And to teach them the gallopade and the mazurka, which is setting a premium on foreigners,” said John with some bitterness.
“Don’t be angry,” cried Jim. “You don’t expect to be cut out by a German or a Pole, do you?”
“You may go to —— with your insinuation,” cried John: “what I object to in the society of Washington is, that it teaches women to amuse themselves; or, rather, that it obliges us to amuse them.”
“That is rather bad,” interrupted a thin pale-looking gentleman with spectacles; “as it must necessarily interfere with our serious pursuits.”
“Such as drinking punch, and playing cards,” observed the Southerner.