“But it isn’t ‘Europe’ yet!” I laughed.
Well, she didn’t care if it wasn’t. “I mean going on this way. I could go on for ever—for ever and ever.”
“Ah you know it’s not always like this,” I hastened to mention.
“Well, it’s better than Boston.”
“It isn’t so good as Paris,” I still more portentously noted.
“Oh I know all about Paris. There’s no freshness in that. I feel as if I had been there all the time.”
“You mean you’ve heard so much of it?”
“Oh yes, nothing else for ten years.”
I had come to talk with Miss Mavis because she was attractive, but I had been rather conscious of the absence of a good topic, not feeling at liberty to revert to Mr. Porterfield. She hadn’t encouraged me, when I spoke to her as we were leaving Boston, to go on with the history of my acquaintance with this gentleman; and yet now, unexpectedly, she appeared to imply—it was doubtless one of the disparities mentioned by Mrs. Nettlepoint—that he might be glanced at without indelicacy.
“I see—you mean by letters,” I remarked.