"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."
"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."
"Does the instinct that you speak of to be kind and right always guide the young American lady?"
"I suppose so--so far as I know. It _must_. She walks by it, and sets her feet down firmly. Here I feel all the time as if I were walking among traps blindfolded."