"Yes, you. You would call for me, and wait till I was ready to come down. Then you and I would go alone," she added, enjoying my look of incredulity. "It is the custom: no harm could come of it," she added. "We would walk to our ball."
"No harm in the case that you have supposed, but in some other cases—"
"You suppose a good deal," she interrupted. "You suppose a girl without self-respect or good sense, and perhaps a man without honor. Here, of course, things cannot be like that. Society seems founded upon different ideas from those prevalent with us about men and women. Here, I admit, a girl finds comfort and protection and ease of mind in a good chaperon. Yet it seemed strange to me to put on leading-strings when I came out here: I had been used to take care of myself for so many years."
"Why, Miss Leare," I said, laughing, "you cannot have been many years in society."
"I am twenty," she said frankly, "and we came to Europe about three years ago. But before that time I had been in company a good deal. Not in the city, for I was not 'out,' but in the hotels at Newport, at the Springs and in the country. In America one has but to do what one knows is kind and right, and no one will think evil: here one may do, without suspecting it, so many compromising things."
"Does the instinct that you speak of to be kind and right always guide the young American lady?"
"I suppose so—so far as I know. It must. She walks by it, and sets her feet down firmly. Here I feel all the time as if I were walking among traps blindfolded."
The ball of the Jardin d'Hiver in the Champs Élysées was a superb success. The immense glass-house was fitted up for dancing, and all went merry as a marriage-bell, with a crater about to open under our feet, as at the duchess of Richmond's ball at Brussels.
Miss Leare was there, but quiet and dignified. There was not the smallest touch of vulgarity about her. The coarse readiness to accept publicity which distinguishes the underbred woman, whether in England or America, the desire to show off a foreign emancipation from what appear ridiculous French rules, were not in her.
Yet she might have amused herself as she liked with complete impunity, for Mrs. Leare appeared to leave her entirely alone. I danced with her as often as she would permit me, and my heart was no longer in my own possession when I put-her into her carriage about dawn.