The Portable Henry James by Henry James Page B

himself at Homburg, and, though he was on his travels, was rarely perceived to visit any particular city at the moment selected by his mother for her own appearance there. Her nephew, who had come up to Vevey expressly to see her, was therefore more attentive than those who, as she said, were nearer to her. He had imbibed at Geneva the idea that one must always be attentive to one’s aunt. Mrs. Costello had not seen him for many years, and she was greatly pleased with him, manifesting her approbation by initiating him into many of the secrets of that social sway which, as she gave him to understand, she exerted in the American capital. She admitted that she was very exclusive; but, if he were acquainted with New York, he would see that one had to be. And her picture of the minutely hierarchical constitution of the society of that city, which she presented to him in many different lights, was, to Winterbourne’s imagination, almost oppressively striking.
    He immediately perceived, from her tone, that Miss Daisy Miller’s place in the social scale was low. “I am afraid you don’t approve of them,” he said.
    “They are very common,” Mrs. Costello declared. “They are the sort of Americans that one does one’s duty by not—not accepting.”
    “Ah, you don’t accept them?” said the young man.
    “I can’t, my dear Frederick. I would if I could, but I can’t.”
    “The young girl is very pretty,” said Winterbourne, in a moment.
    “Of course she’s pretty. But she is very common.”
    “I see what you mean, of course,” said Winterbourne, after another pause.
    “She has that charming look that they all have,” his aunt resumed. “I can’t think where they pick it up; and she dresses in perfection—no, you don’t know how well she dresses. I can’t think where they get their taste.”
    “But, my dear aunt, she is not, after all, a Comanche savage.”
    “She is a young lady,” said Mrs. Costello, “who has an intimacy with her mamma’s courier.”
    “An intimacy with the courier?” the young man demanded.
    “Oh, the mother is just as bad! They treat the courier like a familiar friend—like a gentleman. I shouldn’t wonder if he dines with them. Very likely they have never seen a man with such good manners, such fine clothes, so like a gentleman. He probably corresponds to the young lady’s idea of a Count. He sits with them in the garden, in the evening. I think he smokes.”
    Winterbourne listened with interest to these disclosures; they helped him to make up his mind about Miss Daisy. Evidently she was rather wild. “Well,” he said, “I am not a courier, and yet she was very charming to me.”
    “You had better have said at first,” said Mrs. Costello with dignity, “that you had made her acquaintance.”
    “We simply met in the garden, and we talked a bit.”
    “ Tout bonnement! And pray what did you say?”
    “I said I should take the liberty of introducing her to my admirable aunt.”
    “I am much obliged to you.”
    “It was to guarantee my respectability,” said Winterbourne.
    “And pray who is to guarantee hers?”
    “Ah, you are cruel!” said the young man. “She’s a very nice girl.”
    “You don’t say that as if you believed it,” Mrs. Costello observed.
    “She is completely uncultivated,” Winterbourne went on. “But she is wonderfully pretty, and, in short, she is very nice. To prove that I believe it, I am going to take her to the Château de Chillon.”
    “You two are going off there together? I should say it proved just the contrary. How long had you known her, may I ask, when this interesting project was formed? You haven’t been twenty-four hours in the house.”
    “I had known her half-an-hour!” said Winterbourne, smiling.
    “Dear me!” cried Mrs. Costello. “What a dreadful girl!”
    Her nephew was silent for some moments. “You really think, then,” he began, earnestly, and with a desire for trustworthy information—“you really think