e.

"Oh but I'm not a little foreign girl; I'm just as English as I can
be," Jeanne de Vionnet had said to him as soon as, in the petit salon,
he sank, shyly enough on his own side, into the place near her vacated
by Madame Gloriani at his approach. Madame Gloriani, who was in black
velvet, with white lace and powdered hair, and whose somewhat massive
majesty melted, at any contact, into the graciousness of some
incomprehensible tongue, moved away to make room for the vague
gentleman, after benevolent greetings to him which embodied, as he
believed, in baffling accents, some recognition of his face from a
couple of Sundays before. Then he had remarked--making the most of the
advantage of his years--that it frightened him quite enough to find
himself dedicated to the entertainment of a little foreign girl. There
were girls he wasn't afraid of--he was quite bold with little
Americans. Thus it was that she had defended herself to the end--"Oh
but I'm almost American too. That's what mamma has wanted me to be--I
mean LIKE that; for she has wanted me to have lots of freedom. She has
known such good results from it."

She was fairly beautiful to him--a faint pastel in an oval frame: he
thought of her already as of some lurking image in a long gallery, the
portrait of a small old-time princess of whom nothing was known but
that she had died young. Little Jeanne wasn't, doubtless, to die
young, but one couldn't, all the same, bear on her lightly enough. It
was bearing hard, it was bearing as HE, in any case, wouldn't bear, to
concern himself, in relation to her, with the question of a young man.
Odious really the question of a young man; one didn't treat such a
person as a maid-servant suspected of a "follower." And then young
men, young men--well, the thing was their business simply, or was at
all events hers. She was fluttered, fairly fevered--to the point of a
little glitter that came and went in her eyes and a pair of pink spots
that stayed in her cheeks--with the great adventure of dining out and
with the greater one still, possibly, of finding a gentleman whom she
must think of as very, very old, a gentleman with eye-glasses,
wrinkles, a long grizzled moustache. She spoke the prettiest English,
our friend thought, that he had ever heard spoken, just as he had
believed her a few minutes before to be speaking the prettiest French.
He wondered almost wistfully if such a sweep of the lyre didn't react
on the spir