Hermione appeared bewildered, uncomfortable and restless, like a spectator on the edge of a great crowd.  “There are too many strangers here to-night,” she said:  “mamma and I do not know one half of them.  They have been brought here by their friends.  To have a salon is mamma’s ambition, but this is not my idea of it.  I feel as if we were out of place among these men, who talk to each other and hardly notice us at all.”

We sat together and exchanged our thoughts in whispers.  It was one of those crowds that create a solitude for lovers.  Not that we talked sentiment or that we were lovers.  We conversed about the excitements of the day—­of the Leste affair, in which the king and the king’s ministry were accused of protecting dishonesty; of the Beauvallon and D’Equivilley duel and the Praslin murder, in connection with both of which the royal family and the ministry were popularly accused of protecting criminals—­and at last the conversation strayed away from France to Hermione’s own girlhood.  She told me of her happy country home in Maryland with her grandmother, and sighed.  I asked her if she was going to the English ball to be given on Wednesday night at the beautiful Jardin d’Hiver in the Champs Elysees.

“I suppose so,” she replied, “but I don’t care for large assemblies:  I feel afraid of the men I meet.  I wish your mother could chaperon me:  it would be much nicer to be with her than with my own.  Mamma understands nothing about looking after me; she wants to have a good time herself, and I am only in her way.  Do you know, Mr. Farquhar, I have a theory that when women have missed anything they ought to have enjoyed in early life, they always want to go back and pick it up.  Mamma had no pleasures in her youth, no attentions, no gayety.  If I am to be chaperoned, I like the real thing.  If I were at home in Maryland, where my father came from, I should need no one to protect me:  you could take me to the ball.”

“I, Miss Hermione?”

“Yes, you.  You would call for me, and wait till I was ready to come down.  Then you and I would go alone,” she added, enjoying my look of incredulity.  “It is the custom:  no harm could come of it,” she added.  “We would walk to our ball.”

“No harm in the case that you have supposed, but in some other cases—­”

“You suppose a good deal,” she interrupted.  “You suppose a girl without self-respect or good sense, and perhaps a man without honor.  Here, of course, things cannot be like that.  Society seems founded upon different ideas from those prevalent with us about men and women. Here, I admit, a girl finds comfort and protection and ease of mind in a good chaperon.  Yet it seemed strange to me to put on leading-strings when I came out here:  I had been used to take care of myself for so many years.”

“Why, Miss Leare,” I said, laughing, “you cannot have been many years in society.”

“I am twenty,” she said frankly, “and we came to Europe about three years ago.  But before that time I had been in company a good deal.  Not in the city, for I was not ‘out,’ but in the hotels at Newport, at the Springs and in the country.  In America one has but to do what one knows is kind and right, and no one will think evil:  here one may do, without suspecting it, so many compromising things.”