Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/331

Rh twist; yet she went on as if positively to add another. 'Why on earth don't you, all of you, leave them alone?'

'Leave them?'

'All your Americans.'

'Don't you like them then—the women?'

She hesitated. 'No. Yes. They're an interest. But they're a nuisance. It's a question, very certainly, if they're worth the trouble they give.'

This at least it seemed he could take in. 'You mean that one should be quite sure first what they are worth?'

He made her laugh now. 'It would appear that you never can be. But also really that you can't keep your hands off.'

He fixed the social scene an instant with his heavy eye. 'Yes. Doesn't it?'

'However,' she pursued as if he again a little irritated her, 'Lily's position is quite simple.'

'Quite. She just loves me.'

'I mean simple for herself. She really makes no differences. It's only we—you and I—who make them all.'

The Prince wondered. 'But she tells me she delights in us; has, that is, such a sense of what we are supposed to "represent."'

'Oh, she thinks she has. Americans think they have all sorts of things; but they haven't. That's just it'—Lady Champer was philosophic. 'Nothing but their Americanism. If you marry anything, you marry that; and if your mother accepts anything that's what she accepts.' Then, though the young man followed the demonstration with an apprehension almost pathetic, she gave him without mercy the whole of it. 'Lily's rigidly logical. A girl—as she knows girls—is "welcomed," on her engagement, before anything else can happen, by the family of her young man; and the motherless girl, alone in the world, more punctually than any other. His mother—if she's a "lady"—takes it upon herself. Then