"Don't know by this time, my dear, and after all I've been through," he nevertheless supplied, "what the American girl always so sublimely takes for granted?"
She looked at him on this with intensity—but that of compassion rather than of the conscious wound. "Dear old Davey, il n'y a que vous for not knowing, by this time, as you say, that I've notoriously nothing in common with the creature you mention. I loathe," she said with her purest gentleness, "the American girl."
He faced her an instant more as for a view of the whole incongruity; then he fetched, on his side, a sigh which might have signified, at her choice, either that he was wrong or that he was finally bored. "Well, you do of course brilliantly misrepresent her. But we're all"—he hastened to patch it up—"unspeakably corrupt."
"That would be a fine lookout for Mr. Fielder if it were true," she judiciously threw off.
"But as you're a judge you know it isn't?"
"It's not as a judge I know it, but as a victim. I don't say we don't do our best," she added; "but we're still of an innocence, an innocence——!
"Then perhaps," Davey offered, "Mr. Fielder will help us; unless he proves, by your measure, worse than ourselves!"
"The worse he may be the better; for it's not possible, as I see him," she said, "that he doesn't know."
"Know, you mean," Davey blandly wondered, "how wrong we are—to be so right?"
"Know more on every subject than all of us put together!" she called back at him as she now hurried off to dress.