“I really think I know a great deal—for a person who has never been there.”
“Have you really never been there?” cried he. “Fancy!”
“Never—except in imagination. And I have been to Paris,” she admitted.
“Fancy,” he repeated with gaiety—“fancy taking those brutes first! But you will come soon?”
“It’s the dream of my life!” Bessie Alden brightly professed.
“Your sister at any rate seems to know a tremendous lot about us,” Lord Lambeth went on.
She appeared to take her view of this. “My sister and I are two very different persons. She has been a great deal in Europe. She has been in England a little—not intimately. But she has met English people in other countries, and she arrives very quickly at conclusions.”
“Ah, I guess she does,” he laughed. “But you must have known some too.”
“No—I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to one before. You’re the first Englishman that—to my knowledge—I’ve ever talked with.”
Bessie Alden made this statement with a certain gravity—almost, as it seemed to the young man, an impressiveness. The impressive always made him feel awkward, and he now began to laugh and swing his stick. “Ah, you’d have been sure to know!” And then he added after an instant: “I’m sorry I’m not a better specimen.”