Edith Wharton

“ She seemed to address herself to Darrow, though her small eyes were fixed on her friend.
"Madame de Chantelle seems to imagine," she pursued, "that a young American girl ought to have a dossier--a police- record, or whatever you call it: what those awful women in the streets have here. In our country it's enough to know that a young girl's pure and lovely: people don't immediately ask her to show her bank-account and her visiting-list." ”

“ She appears to rely on you to do something." She added with a smile: "Whatever it is, let's have it over!"
Darrow, through his rising sense of apprehension, wondered why, instead of merely going for a walk, he had not jumped into the first train and got out of the way till Owen's affairs were finally settled.
"But what in the name of goodness can I do?" he protested, following Anna back into the hall.
"I don't know. But Owen seems so to rely on you, too----"
"Owen! Is HE to be there?" ”

“ Anna was in her usual seat behind the tea-tray, and Sophy Viner presently led in her pupil. Owen was also there, seated, as usual, a little apart from the others, and following Miss Painter's massive movements and equally substantial utterances with a smile of secret intelligence which gave Darrow the idea of his having been in clandestine parley with the enemy. Darrow further took note that the girl and her suitor perceptibly avoided each other; but this might be a natural result of the tension Miss Painter had been summoned to relieve. ”

“ Yet, as she evidently felt no incongruity in her attitude, so she revealed no desire to parade her familiarity with the fashionable, or indeed any sense of it as a fact to be paraded. It was evident that the titled ladies whom she spoke of as Mimi or Simone or Odette were as much "those people" to her as the bonne who tampered with her tea and steamed the stamps off her letters ("when, by a miracle, I don't put them in the box myself.") ”

“ Darrow, with a laugh, affirmed his previous experience of French dampness, and the degree to which he was on his guard against it; but the lady, with a contemptuous snort, rejoined: "You young men are all alike----"; to which she appended, after another hard look at him: "I suppose you're George Darrow? ”

“ But he was more and more aware of his inability to test the moral atmosphere about him: he was like a man in fever testing another's temperature by the touch.
After luncheon Anna, who was to motor the surgeon home, suggested to Darrow that he should accompany them. Effie was also of the party; and Darrow inferred that Anna wished to give her step-son a chance to be alone with his betrothed. On the way back, after the surgeon had been left at his door, the little girl sat between her mother and Darrow, and her presence kept their talk from taking a personal turn. Darrow knew that Mrs. ”

“ She always applied to the French race the distant epithet of "those people", but she betrayed an intimate acquaintance with many of its members, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the domestic habits, financial difficulties and private complications of various persons of social importance. ”