t was the end of it: there
was no use trying to express them. Those you _could_ express were not
real or not important ones and were not worth talking about. Mr.
Wendover asked her if she liked English society and if it were superior
to American; also if the tone were very high in London. She thought his
questions 'academic'--the term she used to see applied in the _Times_ to
certain speeches in Parliament. Bending his long leanness over her (she
had never seen a man whose material presence was so insubstantial, so
unoppressive) and walking almost sidewise, to give her a proper
attention, he struck her as innocent, as incapable of guessing that she
had had a certain observation of life. They were talking about totally
different things: English society, as he asked her judgment upon it and
she had happened to see it, was an affair that he didn't suspect. If
she were to give him that judgment it would be more than he doubtless
bargained for; but she would do it not to make him open his eyes--only
to relieve herself. She had thought of that before in regard to two or
three persons she had met--of the satisfaction of breaking out with some
of her feelings. It would make little difference whether the person
understood her or not; the one who should do so best would be far from
understanding everything. 'I want to get out of it, please--out of the
set I live in, the one I have tumbled into through my sister, the people
you saw just now. There are thousands of people in London who are
different from that and ever so much nicer; but I don't see them, I
don't know how to get at them; and after all, poor dear man, what power
have you to help me?' That was in the last analysis the gist of what she
had to say.

Mr. Wendover asked her about Selina in the tone of a person who thought
Mrs. Berrington a very important phenomenon, and that by itself was
irritating to Laura Wing. Important--gracious goodness, no! She might
have to live with her, to hold her tongue about her; but at least she
was not bound to exaggerate her significance. The young man forbore
decorously to make use of the expression, but she could see that he
supposed Selina to be a professional beauty and she guessed that as this
product had not yet been domesticated in the western world the desire to
behold it, after having read so much about it, had been one of the
motives of Mr. Wendover's pilgrimage. Mrs. Schooling, who must have been
a goose, had told him that Mrs.