She paused again for an instant;
she was looking at Winterbourne with all her prettiness in her
lively eyes and in her light, slightly monotonous smile.
"I have always had," she said, "a great deal of gentlemen's society."
Poor Winterbourne was amused, perplexed, and decidedly charmed.
He had never yet heard a young girl express herself in just
this fashion; never, at least, save in cases where to say such
things seemed a kind of demonstrative evidence of a certain
laxity of deportment. And yet was he to accuse Miss Daisy Miller
of actual or potential inconduite, as they said at Geneva?
He felt that he had lived at Geneva so long that he had lost
a good deal; he had become dishabituated to the American tone.
Never, indeed, since he had grown old enough to appreciate things,
had he encountered a young American girl of so pronounced a type as this.
Certainly she was very charming, but how deucedly sociable!
Was she simply a pretty girl from New York State? Were they all
like that, the pretty girls who had a good deal of gentlemen's society?
Or was she also a designing, an audacious, an unscrupulous young person?
Winterbourne had lost his instinct in this matter, and his reason
could not help him.
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