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 remarked, "is your extreme catholicity of taste in respect of people. You know more lost souls than any nice person I ever met."

Floss burst out laughing. "To the pure all things' are pure. I'm getting revenge."

"On what, for goodness' sake?"

"On all the Elsie books they made me read," she parried.

Grover was silent. So even Floss's militant bohemianism masked a principle. Scratch an American, even the most scatter-brained, and you'd find a streak of idealism, sometimes straight, sometimes grotesquely bent out of shape. Privately he wondered whether Floss were not also taking revenge on a layer of society that had, to use her own term, high-hatted her. That would account for her none too deferential treatment of the Marchesa, who, whatever her moeurs might be, was solidly enough entrenched in the Almanach de Gotha. He was sorry for Floss, as he was sorry sooner or later for all the people he really liked. He thought of certain old ladies in Massachusetts who would run squawking from Floss's presence, yet Floss's character was proof against acids that would reduce them to a white ash.

Is it merely because he's French, Grover wondered, or is it because the friends you make when you're grown-up never come so close to you as the friends