He wrote Blanche a charming
note, to which she replied with a great deal of spirit and grace. Her
little letter was very prettily turned, and Bernard, reading it over two
or three times, said to himself that, to do her justice, she might very
well have polished her intellect a trifle during these two or three
years. As she was older, she could hardly help being wiser. It even
occurred to Bernard that she might have profited by the sort of
experience that is known as the discipline of suffering. What had become
of Captain Lovelock and that tender passion which was apparently none
the less genuine for having been expressed in the slang of a humorous
period? Had they been permanently separated by judicious guardians, and
had she been obliged to obliterate his image from her lightly-beating
little heart? Bernard had felt sure at Baden that, beneath her
contemptuous airs and that impertinent consciousness of the difficulties
of conquest by which a pretty American girl attests her allegiance to a
civilization in which young women occupy the highest place--he had felt
sure that Blanche had a high appreciation of her handsome Englishman,
and that if Lovelock should continue to relish her charms, he might
count upon the advantages of reciprocity.
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