“Oh, not in the same way.  I mean—­” she paused, sinking into the chair, and betraying, for the first time, a momentary inability to deal becomingly with the situation.  “I mean,” she resumed smiling, “that it was not an event for them, as it was for me.”

“An event?” he caught her up again, eagerly; for what, in the language of any civilization, could that word mean but just the one thing he most wished it to?

“To be with dear, good, sweet, simple, real Americans again!” she burst out, heaping up her epithets with reckless prodigality.

Durham’s smile once more faded to impersonality, as he rejoined, just a shade on the defensive:  “If it’s merely our Americanism you enjoyed—­I’ve no doubt we can give you all you want in that line.”

“Yes, it’s just that!  But if you knew what the word means to me!  It means—­it means—­” she paused as if to assure herself that they were sufficiently isolated from the desultory groups beneath the other trees—­“it means that I’m safe with them:  as safe as in a bank!”

Durham felt a sudden warmth behind his eyes and in his throat.  “I think I do know—­”

“No, you don’t, really; you can’t know how dear and strange and familiar it all sounded:  the old New York names that kept coming up in your mother’s talk, and her charming quaint ideas about Europe—­their all regarding it as a great big innocent pleasure ground and shop for Americans; and your mother’s missing the home-made bread and preferring the American asparagus—­I’m so tired of Americans who despise even their own asparagus!  And then your married sister’s spending her summers at—­where is it?—­the Kittawittany House on Lake Pohunk—­”

A vision of earnest women in Shetland shawls, with spectacles and thin knobs of hair, eating blueberry pie at unwholesome hours in a shingled dining-room on a bare New England hill-top, rose pallidly between Durham and the verdant brightness of the Champs Elysees, and he protested with a slight smile:  “Oh, but my married sister is the black sheep of the family—­the rest of us never sank as low as that.”

“Low?  I think it’s beautiful—­fresh and innocent and simple.  I remember going to such a place once.  They have early dinner—­rather late—­and go off in buckboards over terrible roads, and bring back golden rod and autumn leaves, and read nature books aloud on the piazza; and there is always one shy young man in flannels—­only one—­who has come to see the prettiest girl (though how he can choose among so many!) and who takes her off in a buggy for hours and hours—­” She paused and summed up with a long sigh:  “It is fifteen years since I was in America.”

“And you’re still so good an American.”

“Oh, a better and better one every day!”

He hesitated.  “Then why did you never come back?”

Her face altered instantly, exchanging its retrospective light for the look of slightly shadowed watchfulness which he had known as most habitual to it.