“It will be useful to you over there when you travel.” “Well yes, if we do. But I don’t suppose we shall much. Mr. Nettlepoint says we ought,” my young woman added in a moment. “Ah of course _he_ thinks so. He has been all over the world.” “Yes, he has described some of the places. They must be wonderful. I didn’t know I should like it so much.” “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. “We won’t live in a good part. I know enough to know that,” she went on. “Well, it isn’t as if there were any very bad ones,” I answered reassuringly. “Why Mr. Nettlepoint says it’s regular mean.” “And to what does he apply that expression?” She eyed me a moment as if I were elegant at her expense, but she answered my question. “Up there in the Batignolles. I seem to make out it’s worse than Merrimac Avenue.” “Worse—in what way?” “Why, even less where the nice people live.” “He oughtn’t to say that,” I returned. And I ventured to back it up. “Don’t you call Mr. Porterfield a nice person?” “Oh it doesn’t make any difference.” She watched me again a moment through her veil, the texture of which gave her look a suffused prettiness. “Do you know him very little?” she asked. “Mr. Porterfield?” “No, Mr. Nettlepoint.” “Ah very little. He’s very considerably my junior, you see.” She had a fresh pause, as if almost again for my elegance; but she went on: “He’s younger than me too.” I don’t know what effect of the comic there could have been in it, but the turn was unexpected and it made me laugh. Neither do I know whether Miss Mavis took offence at my sensibility on this head, though I remember thinking at the moment with compunction that it had brought a flush to her cheek. At all events she got up, gathering her shawl and her books into her arm. “I’m going down—I’m tired.” “Tired of me, I’m afraid.” “No, not yet.” “I’m like you,” I confessed. “I should like it to go on and on.”