“Are we going very fast?”

“Not fast, but steadily. Ohne Hast, ohne Rast—­do you know German?”

“Well, I’ve studied it—­some.”

“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.”