“I don’t on the whole recommend,” I smiled, “that your daughter should pay a visit to Thirty-Seventh Street.”
She took it in—with its various bearings—and had after all, I think, to renounce the shrewd view of a contingency. “Why should I be subjected to such trials—so sadly éprouveé?” From the moment nothing at all was to be got from the Rucks—not even eventual gratuitous board—she washed her hands of them altogether. “Why should a daughter of mine like that dreadful girl?”
“Does she like her?”
She challenged me nobly. “Pray do you mean that Aurora’s such a hypocrite?”
I saw no reason to hesitate. “A little, since you inquire. I think you’ve forced her to be.”
“I?”—she was shocked. “I never force my daughter!”
“She’s nevertheless in a false position,” I returned. “She hungers and thirsts for her own great country; she wants to ‘come out’ in New York, which is certainly, socially speaking, the El Dorado of young ladies. She likes any one, for the moment, who will talk to her of that and serve as a connecting-link with the paradise she imagines there. Miss Ruck performs this agreeable office.”
“Your idea is, then, that if she were to go with such a person to America she could drop her afterwards?”
I complimented Mrs. Church on her quickly-working mind, but I explained that I prescribed no such course. “I can’t imagine her—when it should come to the point—embarking with the famille Roque. But I wish she might go nevertheless.”
Mrs. Church shook her head lucidly—she found amusement in my inappropriate zeal. “I trust my poor child may never be guilty of so fatal a mistake. She’s completely in error; she’s wholly unadapted to the peculiar conditions of American life. It wouldn’t please her. She wouldn’t sympathise. My daughter’s ideal’s not the ideal of the class of young women to which Miss Ruck belongs. I fear they’re very numerous; they pervade the place, they give the tone.”