“How should I know,” he coldly demanded, “what a nobody says?”
But on this, as if with the returning taste of a new strength, his daughter could categorically meet him. “She’s not a nobody. She’s an American.”
Mr. Prodmore, for a moment, was struck: he embraced the place, instinctively, in a flash of calculation. “An American?”
He knew all about that. “Americans mostly are!”
“I mean,” said Cora, “to see this place. ‘Wild’ was what she herself called it—and I think she also said she was ‘mad.’”
“She gave”—Mr. Prodmore reviewed the affair—“a fine account of herself! But she won’t do.”
The effect of her new acquaintance on his companion had been such that she could, after an instant, react against this sentence. “Well, when I told her that this particular day perhaps wouldn’t, she said it would just have to.”
“Have to do?” Mr. Prodmore showed again, through a chink, his speculative eye. “For what, then, with such grand airs?”
“Why, I suppose, for what Americans want.”