"No, not even Gussy. But I scarcely think I ought to tell you," he
pursued, "if she herself gave you no glimpse of the fact. Any
implication that she consciously avoided it might make you see deeper
depths."

He spoke with pointed levity, but his companion showed him after an
instant a face just covered--and a little painfully--with the vision of
the possibility brushed away by the joke. "Oh I'm not so bad as that!"
Mr. Longdon modestly ejaculated.

"Well, she doesn't do it always," Vanderbank laughed, "and it's nothing
moreover to what some people are called. Why, there was a fellow there--
" He pulled up, however, and, thinking better of it, selected another
instance. "The Duchess--weren't you introduced to the Duchess?--never
calls me anything but 'Vanderbank' unless she calls me 'caro mio.' It
wouldn't have taken much to make her appeal to YOU with an 'I say,
Longdon!' I can quite hear her."

Mr. Longdon, focussing the effect of the sketch, pointed its moral with
an indulgent: "Oh well, a FOREIGN duchess!" He could make his
distinctions.

"Yes, she's invidiously, cruelly foreign," Vanderbank agreed: "I've
never indeed seen a woman avail herself so cleverly, to make up for the
obloquy of that state, of the benefits and immunities it brings with it.
She has bloomed in the hot-house of her widowhood--she's a Neapolitan
hatched by an incubator."

"A Neapolitan?"--Mr. Longdon seemed all civilly to wish he had only
known it.