"Ah, I should have said in drawing-rooms." "Another matter. The drawing-room is the best place I know to avoid knowing people. I should like to spend all my days that aren't spent with a rod on a river-bank, or lying in a boat with you, in drawing-rooms. I'd like"--he stared up into the high-piled clouds sailing across the intense blue--"I'd like the big Engine-driver up yonder to look down through the white steam-puffs, and say: 'My boy, I give you my word of honor that I'll never run you into any closer quarters with life than you are in now.'" "I see," laughed De Poincy, "lovely woman has pursued you till you fight shy. But don't lay it all to your looks and your winning ways, my friend; you're known to have dollars." "Yes." His dark face flushed under some quick wave of feeling. "The most surprising thing I've found in Europe is the dominance of the money motive, that quality that they had told me distinguished the American." He laughed a little bitterly. "Well," said De Poincy, "you know you do hear more in America about money than you do anywhere." "Exactly. Money's talked about with childlike and damnable iteration; but, by all the gods! if decent people with us want it, they work for it; they don't cringe and angle for it; they offer labor in exchange, not _themselves_. They don't, as a nation, make it the basis of friendship, of marriage." "If you don't, it's because American women are too self-willed to hear prudence." "Yes, thank God! And yet we have the intelligent foreigner saying the climate makes our women sexless." He stopped and laughed. "I admit les Américaines don't so universally look on love and marriage as a profession, their only means of settlement in life. But I'll tell you what it is, my friend: the American, with all his outward frankness and _naïveté_, cares more, like men of other nations, for the thing he doesn't talk about than for things he's always flinging in your face. With people on this side, it's money which is too sacred to be mentioned except on solemn occasions"--he made the slightest possible grimace--"but which is the supreme consideration. With us, the thing we don't talk about, and yet care for the more, is the relation between the sexes, the ideal of a chivalry that the elder world has lost, or, more truly, never had, I think." "The truth is, you've been long enough away from America to begin to idealize it. By the way, I thought you were of the _élite_ asked to the Château d'Avranchéville this autumn." "This is better than Normandy," he said, shortly. "Ah, but think of the dear creatures gathered there?" "I'd rather think about 'em." "Mademoiselle Lucie this time, _hein_?" "Oh no--only that I don't love my kind." De Poincy shook his head. "That you don't love _that_ kind shows you're getting _blasé_." Gano sat up, and fixed his dark eyes on his friend's face. "You know you're talking nonsense. You'll allow I met her under peculiar circumstances."