Page:The Portrait of a Lady (London, Macmillan & Co., 1881) Volume 1.djvu/267

 Ah, my dear je viens de loin; I belong to the old world. But it is not of that I wish to talk; I wish to talk about the new. You must tell me more about America; you never tell me enough. Here I have been since I was brought here as a helpless child, and it is ridiculous, or rather it's scandalous, how little I know about the land of my birth. There are a great many of us like that, over here; and I must say I think we are a wretched set of people. You should live in your own country; whatever it may be you have your natural place there. If we are not good Americans we are certainly poor Europeans; we have no natural place here. We are mere parasites, crawling over the surface; we haven't our feet in the soil. At least one can know it, and not have illusions. A woman, perhaps, can get on; a woman, it seems to me, has no natural place anywhere; whereever she finds herself she has to remain on the surface and, more or less, to crawl. You protest, my dear? you are horrified? you declare you will never crawl? It is very true that I don't see you crawling; you stand more upright than a good many poor creatures. Very good; on the whole, I don't think you will crawl. But the men, the Americans; je vous demande un peu, what do they make of it over here? I don't envy them, trying to arrange themselves. Look at poor Ralph Touchett; what sort of a figure do you call that? Fortunately he has got a consumption; I say fortunately, because it gives him something to do. His consumption is his career; it's a kind of position. You can say, 'Oh, Mr. Touchett, he takes care of his lungs, he knows a great deal about climates.' But without that, who would he be, what would he represent? 'Mr. Ralph Touchett, an American who lives in Europe.' That signifies absolutely nothing—it's impossible that anything should signify less. 'He is very cultivated,' they say; 'he has got a very pretty collection