much else on the other--the way he
crumbed up his bread was a proof--why did he hover before her as a
potentially insolent noble? She couldn't have answered the question,
and it was precisely one of those that swarmed. They were complicated,
she might fairly have said, by his visibly knowing, having known from
afar off, that she was a stranger and an American, and by his none the
less making no more of it than if she and her like were the chief of
his diet. He took her, kindly enough, but imperturbably, irreclaimably,
for granted, and it wouldn't in the least help that she herself knew
him, as quickly, for having been in her country and threshed it out.
There would be nothing for her to explain or attenuate or brag about;
she could neither escape nor prevail by her strangeness; he would have,
for that matter, on such a subject, more to tell her than to learn from
her. She might learn from _him_ why she was so different from the
handsome girl--which she didn't know, being merely able to feel it; or
at any rate might learn from him why the handsome girl was so different
from her.

On these lines, however, they would move later; the lines immediately
laid down were, in spite of his vagueness for his own convenience,
definite enough. She was already, he observed to her, thinking what she
should say on her other side--which was what Americans were always
doing. She needn't in conscience say anything at all; but Americans
never knew that, nor ever, poor creatures, yes (_she_ had interposed
the "poor creatures!") what not to do. The burdens they took on--the
things, positively, they made an affair of! This easy and, after all,
friendly jibe at her race was really for her, on her new friend's part,
the note of personal recognition so far as she required it; and she
gave him a prompt and conscious example of morbid anxiety by insisting
that her desire to be, herself, "lovely" all round was justly founded
on the lovely way Mrs. Lowder had met her. He was directly interested
in that, and it was not till afterwards that she fully knew how much
more information about their friend he had taken than given. Here
again, for instance, was a pertinent note for her: she had, on the
spot, with her first plunge into the obscure depths of a society
constituted from far back, encountered the interesting phenomenon of
complicated, of possibly sinister motive. However, Maud Manningham (her
name, even in her presence, somehow still fed the fancy)