“Oh I mean everything. For instance, I’ve to pretend to be a jeune fille. I’m not a jeune fille; no American girl’s a jeune fille; an American girl’s an intelligent responsible creature. I’ve to pretend to be idiotically innocent, but I’m not in the least innocent.”
This, however, was easy to meet. “You don’t in the least pretend to be innocent; you pretend to be—what shall I call it?—uncannily wise.”
“That’s no pretence. I am uncannily wise. You could call it nothing more true.”
I went along with her a little, rather thrilled by this finer freedom. “You’re essentially not an American girl.”
She almost stopped, looking at me; there came a flush to her cheek. “Voilà!” she said. “There’s my false position. I want to be an American girl, and I’ve been hideously deprived of that immense convenience, that beautiful resource.”
“Do you want me to tell you?” I pursued with interest. “It would be utterly impossible to an American girl—I mean unperverted, and that’s the whole point—to talk as you’re talking to me now.”
The expressive eagerness she showed for this was charming. “Please tell me then! How would she talk?”
“I can’t tell you all the things she’d say, but I think I can tell you most of the things she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t reason out her conduct as you seem to me to do.”
Aurora gave me the most flattering attention. “I see. She would be simpler. To do very simply things not at all simple—that’s the American girl!”
I greatly enjoyed our intellectual relation. “I don’t know whether you’re a French girl, or what you are, but, you know, I find you witty.”