of the Tiber. He didn't meet my eye, and he was serious; which struck me as a promise of further entertainment. From the Ripetta we strolled to the Piazza del Popolo, and then began to mount one of the winding ways that diversify the slope of the Pincian. Before we got to the top Wilmerding said to me: What do you mean by the different way we people see things? Whom do you mean by us people?
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You innocent children of the west, most unsophisticated of Yankees. Your ideas, your standards, your measures, your manners are different.
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The ideas and the manners of gentlemen are the same all the world over.
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YesI fear I can't gainsay you there, I replied.
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I don't ask for the least allowance on the score of being a child of the west. I don't propose to be a barbarian anywhere.
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You're the best fellow in the world, I continued; but it's nevertheless trueI have been impressed with it on various occasionsthat your countrypeople have, in perfect good faith, a different attitude toward women. They think certain things possible that we Europeans, cynical and corrupt, look at with a suspicious eye.
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Oh, don't you know them? You have more freedom than we.
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Ah, never! my companion cried, in a tone of conviction that still rings in my ears.
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What I mean is that you have less, I said, laughing. Evidently women,
chez vous,
are not so easily compromised. You must live, over there, in a state of Arcadian, or rather of much more than Arcadian innocence. You can do all sorts of things without committing yourselves. With a quarter of them, in this uncomfortable hemisphere, one is up to one's neck in engagements.
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One has given pledges that have in honour to be redeemedunless a fellow chooses to wriggle out of them. There is the question of intentions, and the question of how far, in the eyes of the world, people have really gone. Here
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