He had, however, engaged to do more than proved feasible in promising to present his aunt, Mrs. Costello, to Miss Daisy Miller. As soon as that lady had got better of her headache he waited on her in her apartment and, after a show of the proper solicitude about her health, asked if she had noticed in the hotel an American family—a mamma, a daughter and an obstreperous little boy.
“An obstreperous little boy and a preposterous big courier?” said Mrs. Costello. “Oh yes, I’ve noticed them. Seen them, heard them and keep out of their way.” Mrs. Costello was a widow of fortune, a person of much distinction and who frequently intimated that if she hadn’t been so dreadfully liable to sick-headaches she would probably have left a deeper impress on her time. She had a long pale face, a high nose and a great deal of very striking white hair, which she wore in large puffs and over the top of her head. She had two sons married in New York and another who was now in Europe. This young man was amusing himself at Homburg and, though guided by his taste, was rarely observed to visit any particular city at the moment selected by his mother for her appearance there. Her nephew, who had come to Vevey expressly to see her, was therefore more attentive than, as she said, her very own. He had imbibed at Geneva the idea that one must be irreproachable in all such forms. Mrs. Costello hadn’t seen him for many years and was now greatly pleased with him, manifesting her approbation by initiating him into many of the secrets of that social sway which, as he could see she would like him to think, she exerted from her stronghold in Forty-Second Street.1 She admitted that she was very exclusive, but if he had been better 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 at once recognised from her tone that Miss Daisy Miller’s place in the social scale was low. “I’m afraid you don’t approve of them,” he pursued in reference to his new friends.
“They’re horribly common”—it was perfectly simple. “They’re the sort of Americans that one does one’s duty by just ignoring.”
“Ah you just ignore them?”—the young man took it in.
“I can’t not, my dear Frederick. I wouldn’t if I hadn’t to, but I have to.”
“The little girl’s very pretty,” he went on in a moment.
“Of course she’s very pretty. But she’s of the last crudity.”
“I see what you mean of course,” he allowed after another pause.
“She has that charming look 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’s 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 him?” Ah there it was!
“There’s no other name for such a relation. But the skinny little mother’s just as bad! They treat the courier as a familiar friend—as a gentleman and a scholar. I shouldn’t wonder if he dines with them. Very likely they’ve never seen a man with such good manners, such fine clothes, so like a gentleman—or a scholar. He probably corresponds to the young lady’s idea of a count. He sits with them in the garden of an evening. I think he smokes in their faces.”
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’m not a courier and I didn’t smoke in her face, and yet she was very charming to me.”
“You had better have mentioned at first,” Mrs. Costello returned with dignity, “that you had made her valuable acquaintance.”
“We simply met in the garden and talked a bit.”
“By appointment—no? Ah that’s still to come! Pray what did you say?”
“I said I should take the liberty of introducing her to my admirable aunt.”
“Your admirable aunt’s a thousand times obliged to you.”
“It was to guarantee my respectability.”
“And pray who’s to guarantee hers?”
“Ah you’re cruel!” said the young man. “She’s a very innocent girl.”
“You don’t say that as if you believed it,” Mrs. Costello returned.
“She’s completely uneducated,” Winterbourne acknowledged, “but she’s wonderfully pretty, and in short she’s very nice. To prove I believe it I’m going to take her to the Château de Chillon.”
Mrs. Costello made a wondrous face. “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!” Winterbourne smiled.
“Then she’s just what I supposed.”
“And what do you suppose?”
“Why that she’s a horror.”
Our youth was silent for some moments. “You really think then,” he presently began, and with a desire for trustworthy information, “you really think that—” But he paused again while his aunt waited.
“Think what, sir?”
“That she’s the sort of young lady who expects a man sooner or later to—well, we’ll call it carry her off?”
“I haven’t the least idea what such young ladies expect a man to do. But I really consider you had better not meddle with little American girls who are uneducated, as you mildly put it. You’ve lived too long out of the country. You’ll be sure to make some great mistake. You’re too innocent.”
“My dear aunt, not so much as that comes to!” he protested with a laugh and a curl of his moustache.
“You’re too guilty then!”
He continued all thoughtfully to finger the ornament in question. “You won’t let the poor girl know you then?” he asked at last.
“Is it literally true that she’s going to the Château de Chillon with you?”
“I’ve no doubt she fully intends it.”
“Then, my dear Frederick,” said Mrs. Costello, “I must decline the honour of her acquaintance. I’m an old woman, but I’m not too old—thank heaven—to be honestly shocked!”
“But don’t they all do these things—the little American girls at home?” Winterbourne enquired.
Mrs. Costello stared a moment. “I should like to see my granddaughters do them!” she then grimly returned.
This seemed to throw some light on the matter, for Winterbourne remembered to have heard his pretty cousins in New York, the daughters of this lady’s two daughters, called “tremendous flirts.” If therefore Miss Daisy Miller exceeded the liberal licence allowed to these young women it was probable she did go even by the American allowance rather far. Winterbourne was impatient to see her again, and it vexed, it even a little humiliated him, that he shouldn’t by instinct appreciate her justly.
Though so impatient to see her again he hardly knew what ground he should give for his aunt’s refusal to become acquainted with her; but he discovered promptly enough that with Miss Daisy Miller there was no great need of walking on tiptoe. He found her that evening in the garden, wandering about in the warm starlight after the manner of an indolent sylph and swinging to and fro the largest fan he had ever beheld. It was ten o’clock. He had dined with his aunt, had been sitting with her since dinner, and had just taken leave of her till the morrow. His young friend frankly rejoiced to renew their intercourse; she pronounced it the stupidest evening she had ever passed.
“Have you been all alone?” he asked with no intention of an epigram and no effect of her perceiving one.
“I’ve been walking round with mother. But mother gets tired walking round,” Miss Miller explained.
“Has she gone to bed?”
“No, she doesn’t like to go to bed. She doesn’t sleep scarcely any—not three hours. She says she doesn’t know how she lives. She’s dreadfully nervous. I guess she sleeps more than she thinks. She’s gone somewhere after Randolph; she wants to try to get him to go to bed. He doesn’t like to go to bed.”
The soft impartiality of her constatations, as Winterbourne would have termed them, was a thing by itself—exquisite little fatalist as they seemed to make her. “Let us hope she’ll persuade him,” he encouragingly said.
“Well, she’ll talk to him all she can—but he doesn’t like her to talk to him”: with which Miss Daisy opened and closed her fan. “She’s going to try to get Eugenio to talk to him. But Randolph ain’t afraid of Eugenio. Eugenio’s a splendid courier, but he can’t make much impression on Randolph! I don’t believe he’ll go to bed before eleven.” Her detachment from any invidious judgement of this was, to her companion’s sense, inimitable; and it appeared that Randolph’s vigil was in fact triumphantly prolonged, for Winterbourne attended her in her stroll for some time without meeting her mother. “I’ve been looking round for that lady you want to introduce me to,” she resumed—“I guess she’s your aunt.” Then on his admitting the fact and expressing some curiosity as to how she had learned it, she said she had heard all about Mrs. Costello from the chambermaid. She was very quiet and very comme il faut;2 she wore white puffs; she spoke to no one and she never dined at the common table. Every two days she had a headache. “I think that’s a lovely description, headache and all!” said Miss Daisy, chattering along in her thin gay voice. “I want to know her ever so much. I know just what your aunt would be; I know I’d like her. She’d be very exclusive. I like a lady to be exclusive; I’m dying to be exclusive myself. Well, I guess we are exclusive, mother and I. We don’t speak to any one—or they don’t speak to us. I suppose it’s about the same thing. Anyway, I shall be ever so glad to meet your aunt.”
Winterbourne was embarrassed—he could but trump up some evasion. “She’d be most happy, but I’m afraid those tiresome headaches are always to be reckoned with.”
The girl looked at him through the fine dusk. “Well, I suppose she doesn’t have a headache every day.”
He had to make the best of it. “She tells me she wonderfully does.” He didn’t know what else to say.
Miss Miller stopped and stood looking at him. Her prettiness was still visible in the darkness; she kept flapping to and fro her enormous fan. “She doesn’t want to know me!” she then lightly broke out. “Why don’t you say so? You needn’t be afraid! I’m not afraid!” And she quite crowed for the fun of it.
Winterbourne distinguished however a wee false note in this: he was touched, shocked, mortified by it. “My dear young lady, she knows no one. She goes through life immured. It’s her wretched health.”
The young girl walked on a few steps in the glee of the thing. “You needn’t be afraid,” she repeated. “Why should she want to know me?” Then she paused again; she was close to the parapet of the garden, and in front of her was the starlit lake. There was a vague sheen on its surface, and in the distance were dimly-seen mountain forms. Daisy Miller looked out at these great lights and shades and again proclaimed a gay indifference—“Gracious! she is exclusive!” Winterbourne wondered if she were seriously wounded and for a moment almost wished her sense of injury might be such as to make it becoming in him to reassure and comfort her. He had a pleasant sense that she would be all accessible to a respectful tenderness at that moment. He felt quite ready to sacrifice his aunt—conversationally; to acknowledge she was a proud rude woman and to make the point that they needn’t mind her. But before he had time to commit himself to this questionable mixture of gallantry and impiety, the young lady, resuming her walk, gave an exclamation in quite another tone. “Well, here’s mother! I guess she hasn’t got Randolph to go to bed.” The figure of a lady appeared, at a distance, very indistinct in the darkness; it advanced with a slow and wavering step and then suddenly seemed to pause.
“Are you sure it’s your mother? Can you make her out in this thick dusk?” Winterbourne asked.
“Well,” the girl laughed, “I guess I know my own mother! And when she has got on my shawl too. She’s always wearing my things.”
The lady in question, ceasing now to approach, hovered vaguely about the spot at which she had checked her steps.
“I’m afraid your mother doesn’t see you,” said Winterbourne. “Or perhaps,” he added—thinking, with Miss Miller, the joke permissible—“perhaps she feels guilty about your shawl.”
“Oh it’s a fearful old thing!” his companion placidly answered. “I told her she could wear it if she didn’t mind looking like a fright. She won’t come here because she sees you.”
“Ah then,” said Winterbourne, “I had better leave you.”
“Oh no—come on!” the girl insisted.
“I’m afraid your mother doesn’t approve of my walking with you.”
She gave him, he thought, the oddest glance. “It isn’t for me; it’s for you—that is it’s for her. Well, I don’t know who it’s for! But mother doesn’t like any of my gentlemen friends. She’s right down timid. She always makes a fuss if I introduce a gentleman. But I do introduce them—almost always. If I didn’t introduce my gentlemen friends to mother,” Miss Miller added, in her small flat monotone, “I shouldn’t think I was natural.”
“Well, to introduce me,” Winterbourne remarked, “you must know my name.” And he proceeded to pronounce it.
“Oh my—I can’t say all that!” cried his companion, much amused. But by this time they had come up to Mrs. Miller, who, as they drew near, walked to the parapet of the garden and leaned on it, looking intently at the lake and presenting her back to them. “Mother!” said the girl in a tone of decision—upon which the elder lady turned round. “Mr. Frederick Forsyth Winterbourne,” said the latter’s young friend, repeating his lesson of a moment before and introducing him very frankly and prettily. “Common” she might be, as Mrs. Costello had pronounced her; yet what provision was made by that epithet for her queer little native grace?
Her mother was a small spare light person, with a wandering eye, a scarce perceptible nose, and, as to make up for it, an unmistakeable forehead, decorated—but too far back, as Winterbourne mentally described it—with thin much-frizzled hair. Like her daughter Mrs. Miller was dressed with extreme elegance; she had enormous diamonds in her ears. So far as the young man could observe, she gave him no greeting—she certainly wasn’t looking at him. Daisy was near her, pulling her shawl straight. “What are you doing, poking round here?” this young lady enquired—yet by no means with the harshness of accent her choice of words might have implied.
“Well, I don’t know”—and the new-comer turned to the lake again.
“I shouldn’t think you’d want that shawl!” Daisy familiarly proceeded.
“Well—I do!” her mother answered with a sound that partook for Winterbourne of an odd strain between mirth and woe.
“Did you get Randolph to go to bed?” Daisy asked.
“No, I couldn’t induce him”—and Mrs. Miller seemed to confess to the same mild fatalism as her daughter. “He wants to talk to the waiter. He likes to talk to that waiter.”
“I was just telling Mr. Winterbourne,” the girl went on; and to the young man’s ear her tone might have indicated that she had been uttering his name all her life.
“Oh yes!” he concurred—“I’ve the pleasure of knowing your son.”
Randolph’s mamma was silent; she kept her attention on the lake. But at last a sigh broke from her. “Well, I don’t see how he lives!”
“Anyhow, it isn’t so bad as it was at Dover,” Daisy at least opined.
“And what occurred at Dover?” Winterbourne desired to know.
“He wouldn’t go to bed at all. I guess he sat up all night—in the public parlour. He wasn’t in bed at twelve o’clock: it seemed as if he couldn’t budge.”
“It was half-past twelve when I gave up,” Mrs. Miller recorded with passionless accuracy.
It was of great interest to Winterbourne. “Does he sleep much during the day?”
“I guess he doesn’t sleep very much,” Daisy rejoined.
“I wish he just would!” said her mother. “It seems as if he must make it up somehow.”
“Well, I guess it’s we that make it up. I think he’s real tiresome,” Daisy pursued.
After which, for some moments, there was silence.
“Well, Daisy Miller,” the elder lady then unexpectedly broke out, “I shouldn’t think you’d want to talk against your own brother!”
“Well, he is tiresome, mother,” said the girl, but with no sharpness of insistence.
“Well, he’s only nine,” Mrs. Miller lucidly urged.
“Well, he wouldn’t go up to that castle, anyway,” her daughter replied as for accommodation. “I’m going up there with Mr. Winterbourne.”
To this announcement, very placidly made, Daisy’s parent offered no response. Winterbourne took for granted on this that she opposed such a course; but he said to himself at the same time that she was a simple easily-managed person and that a few deferential protestations would modify her attitude. “Yes,” he therefore interposed, “your daughter has kindly allowed me the honour of being her guide.”
Mrs. Miller’s wandering eyes attached themselves with an appealing air to her other companion, who, however, strolled a few steps further, gently humming to herself. “I presume you’ll go in the cars,” she then quite colourlessly remarked.
“Yes, or in the boat,” said Winterbourne.
“Well, of course I don’t know,” Mrs. Miller returned. “I’ve never been up to that castle.”
“It is a pity you shouldn’t go,” he observed, beginning to feel reassured as to her opposition. And yet he was quite prepared to find that as a matter of course she meant to accompany her daughter.
It was on this view accordingly that light was projected for him. “We’ve been thinking ever so much about going, but it seems as if we couldn’t. Of course Daisy—she wants to go round everywhere. But there’s a lady here—I don’t know her name—she says she shouldn’t think we’d want to go to see castles here; she should think we’d want to wait till we got t’ Italy. It seems as if there would be so many there,” continued Mrs. Miller with an air of increasing confidence. “Of course we only want to see the principal ones. We visited several in England,” she presently added.
“Ah yes, in England there are beautiful castles,” said Winterbourne. “But Chillon here is very well worth seeing.”
“Well, if Daisy feels up to it—” said Mrs. Miller in a tone that seemed to break under the burden of such conceptions. “It seems as if there’s nothing she won’t undertake.”
“Oh I’m pretty sure she’ll enjoy it!” Winterbourne declared. And he desired more and more to make it a certainty that he was to have the privilege of a tête-à-tête with the young lady who was still strolling along in front of them and softly vocalising. “You’re not disposed, madam,” he enquired, “to make the so interesting excursion yourself?”
So addressed Daisy’s mother looked at him an instant with a certain scared obliquity and then walked forward in silence. Then, “I guess she had better go alone,” she said simply.
It gave him occasion to note that this was a very different type of maternity from that of the vigilant matrons who massed themselves in the forefront of social intercourse in the dark old city at the other end of the lake. But his meditations were interrupted by hearing his name very distinctly pronounced by Mrs. Miller’s unprotected daughter. “Mr. Winterbourne!” she piped from a considerable distance.
“Mademoiselle!” said the young man.
“Don’t you want to take me out in a boat?”
“At present?” he asked.
“Why of course!” she gaily returned.
“Well, Annie Miller!” exclaimed her mother.
“I beg you, madam, to let her go,” he hereupon eagerly pleaded; so instantly had he been struck with the romantic side of this chance to guide through the summer starlight a skiff freighted with a fresh and beautiful young girl.
“I shouldn’t think she’d want to,” said her mother. “I should think she’d rather go indoors.”
“I’m sure Mr. Winterbourne wants to take me,” Daisy declared. “He’s so awfully devoted!”
“I’ll row you over to Chillon under the stars.”
“I don’t believe it!” Daisy laughed.
“Well!” the elder lady again gasped, as in rebuke of this freedom.
“You haven’t spoken to me for half an hour,” her daughter went on.
“I’ve been having some very pleasant conversation with your mother,” Winterbourne replied.
“Oh pshaw! I want you to take me out in a boat!” Daisy went on as if nothing else had been said. They had all stopped and she had turned round and was looking at her friend. Her face wore a charming smile, her pretty eyes gleamed in the darkness, she swung her great fan about. No, he felt, it was impossible to be prettier than that.
“There are half a dozen boats moored at that landing-place,” and he pointed to a range of steps that descended from the garden to the lake. “If you’ll do me the honour to accept my arm we’ll go and select one of them.”
She stood there smiling; she threw back her head; she laughed as for the drollery of this. “I like a gentleman to be formal!”
“I assure you it’s a formal offer.”
“I was bound I’d make you say something,” Daisy agreeably mocked.
“You see it’s not very difficult,” said Winterbourne. “But I’m afraid you’re chaffing me.”
“I think not, sir,” Mrs. Miller shyly pleaded.
“Do then let me give you a row,” he persisted to Daisy.
“It’s quite lovely, the way you say that!” she cried in reward.
“It will be still more lovely to do it.”
“Yes, it would be lovely!” But she made no movement to accompany him; she only remained an elegant image of free light irony.
“I guess you’d better find out what time it is,” her mother impartially contributed.
“It’s eleven o’clock, Madam,” said a voice with a foreign accent out of the neighbouring darkness; and Winterbourne, turning, recognised the florid personage he had already seen in attendance. He had apparently just approached.
“Oh Eugenio,” said Daisy, “I’m going out with Mr. Winterbourne in a boat!”
Eugenio bowed. “At this hour of the night, Mademoiselle?”
“I’m going with Mr. Winterbourne,” she repeated with her shining smile. “I’m going this very minute.”
“Do tell her she can’t, Eugenio,” Mrs. Miller said to the courier.
“I think you had better not go out in a boat, Mademoiselle,” the man declared.
Winterbourne wished to goodness this pretty girl were not on such familiar terms with her courier; but he said nothing, and she meanwhile added to his ground. “I suppose you don’t think it’s proper! My!” she wailed; “Eugenio doesn’t think anything’s proper.”
“I’m nevertheless quite at your service,” Winterbourne hastened to remark.
“Does Mademoiselle propose to go alone?” Eugenio asked of Mrs. Miller.
“Oh no, with this gentleman!” cried Daisy’s mamma for reassurance.
“I meant alone with the gentleman.” The courier looked for a moment at Winterbourne—the latter seemed to make out in his face a vague presumptuous intelligence as at the expense of their companions—and then solemnly and with a bow, “As Mademoiselle pleases!” he said.
But Daisy broke off at this. “Oh I hoped you’d make a fuss! I don’t care to go now.”
“Ah but I myself shall make a fuss if you don’t go,” Winterbourne declared with spirit.
“That’s all I want—a little fuss!” With which she began to laugh again.
“Mr. Randolph has retired for the night!” the courier hereupon importantly announced.
“Oh Daisy, now we can go then!” cried Mrs. Miller.
Her daughter turned away from their friend, all lighted with her odd perversity. “Good-night—I hope you’re disappointed or disgusted or something!”
He looked at her gravely, taking her by the hand she offered. “I’m puzzled, if you want to know!” he answered.
“Well, I hope it won’t keep you awake!” she said very smartly; and, under the escort of the privileged Eugenio, the two ladies passed toward the house.
Winterbourne’s eyes followed them; he was indeed quite mystified. He lingered beside the lake a quarter of an hour, baffled by the question of the girl’s sudden familiarities and caprices. But the only very definite conclusion he came to was that he should enjoy deucedly “going off” with her somewhere.
Two days later he went off with her to the Castle of Chillon. He waited for her in the large hall of the hotel, where the couriers, the servants, the foreign tourists were lounging about and staring. It wasn’t the place he would have chosen for a tryst, but she had placidly appointed it. She came tripping downstairs, buttoning her long gloves, squeezing her folded parasol against her pretty figure, dressed exactly in the way that consorted best, to his fancy, with their adventure. He was a man of imagination and, as our ancestors used to say, of sensibility; as he took in her charming air and caught from the great staircase her impatient confiding step the note of some small sweet strain of romance, not intense but clear and sweet, seemed to sound for their start. He could have believed he was really going “off” with her. He led her out through all the idle people assembled—they all looked at her straight and hard: she had begun to chatter as soon as she joined him. His preference had been that they should be conveyed to Chillon in a carriage, but she expressed a lively wish to go in the little steamer—there would be such a lovely breeze upon the water and they should see such lots of people. The sail wasn’t long, but Winterbourne’s companion found time for many characteristic remarks and other demonstrations, not a few of which were, from the extremity of their candour, slightly disconcerting. To the young man himself their small excursion showed so far delightfully irregular and incongruously intimate that, even allowing for her habitual sense of freedom, he had some expectation of seeing her appear to find in it the same savour. But it must be confessed that he was in this particular rather disappointed. Miss Miller was highly animated, she was in the brightest spirits; but she was clearly not at all in a nervous flutter—as she should have been to match his tension; she avoided neither his eyes nor those of any one else; she neither coloured from an awkward consciousness when she looked at him nor when she saw that people were looking at herself. People continued to look at her a great deal, and Winterbourne could at least take pleasure in his pretty companion’s distinguished air. He had been privately afraid she would talk loud, laugh overmuch, and even perhaps desire to move extravagantly about the boat. But he quite forgot his fears; he sat smiling with his eyes on her face while, without stirring from her place, she delivered herself of a great number of original reflexions. It was the most charming innocent prattle he had ever heard, for, by his own experience hitherto, when young persons were so ingenuous they were less articulate and when they were so confident were more sophisticated. If he had assented to the idea that she was “common,” at any rate, was she proving so, after all, or was he simply getting used to her commonness? Her discourse was for the most part of what immediately and superficially surrounded them, but there were moments when it threw out a longer look or took a sudden straight plunge.
“What on earth are you so solemn about?” she suddenly demanded, fixing her agreeable eyes on her friend’s.
“Am I solemn?” he asked. “I had an idea I was grinning from ear to ear.”
“You look as if you were taking me to a prayer-meeting or a funeral. If that’s a grin your ears are very near together.”
“Should you like me to dance a hornpipe on the deck?”
“Pray do, and I’ll carry round your hat. It will pay the expenses of our journey.”
“I never was better pleased in my life,” Winterbourne returned.
She looked at him a moment, then let it renew her amusement. “I like to make you say those things. You’re a queer mixture!”
In the castle, after they had landed, nothing could exceed the light independence of her humour. She tripped about the vaulted chambers, rustled her skirts in the corkscrew staircases, flirted back with a pretty little cry and a shudder from the edge of the oubliettes3 and turned a singularly well-shaped ear to everything Winterbourne told her about the place. But he saw she cared little for mediæval history and that the grim ghosts of Chillon loomed but faintly before her. They had the good fortune to have been able to wander without other society than that of their guide; and Winterbourne arranged with this companion that they shouldn’t be hurried—that they should linger and pause wherever they chose. He interpreted the bargain generously—Winterbourne on his side had been generous—and ended by leaving them quite to themselves. Miss Miller’s observations were marked by no logical consistency; for anything she wanted to say she was sure to find a pretext. She found a great many, in the tortuous passages and rugged embrasures of the place, for asking her young man sudden questions about himself, his family, his previous history, his tastes, his habits, his designs, and for supplying information on corresponding points in her own situation. Of her own tastes, habits and designs the charming creature was prepared to give the most definite and indeed the most favourable account.
“Well, I hope you know enough!” she exclaimed after Winterbourne had sketched for her something of the story of the unhappy Bonnivard.4 “I never saw a man that knew so much!” The history of Bonnivard had evidently, as they say, gone into one ear and out of the other. But this easy erudition struck her none the less as wonderful, and she was soon quite sure she wished Winterbourne would travel with them and “go round” with them: they too in that case might learn something about something. “Don’t you want to come and teach Randolph?” she asked; “I guess he’d improve with a gentleman teacher.” Winterbourne was certain that nothing could possibly please him so much, but that he had unfortunately other occupations. “Other occupations? I don’t believe a speck of it!” she protested. “What do you mean now? You’re not in business.” The young man allowed that he was not in business, but he had engagements which even within a day or two would necessitate his return to Geneva. “Oh bother!” she panted, “I don’t believe it!” and she began to talk about something else. But a few moments later, when he was pointing out to her the interesting design of an antique fireplace, she broke out irrelevantly: “You don’t mean to say you’re going back to Geneva?”
“It is a melancholy fact that I shall have to report myself there to-morrow.”
She met it with a vivacity that could only flatter him. “Well, Mr. Winterbourne, I think you’re horrid!”
“Oh don’t say such dreadful things!” he quite sincerely pleaded—“just at the last.”
“The last?” the girl cried; “I call it the very first! I’ve half a mind to leave you here and go straight back to the hotel alone.” And for the next ten minutes she did nothing but call him horrid. Poor Winterbourne was fairly bewildered; no young lady had as yet done him the honour to be so agitated by the mention of his personal plans. His companion, after this, ceased to pay any attention to the curiosities of Chillon or the beauties of the lake; she opened fire on the special charmer in Geneva whom she appeared to have instantly taken it for granted that he was hurrying back to see. How did Miss Daisy Miller know of that agent of his fate in Geneva? Winterbourne, who denied the existence of such a person, was quite unable to discover; and he was divided between amazement at the rapidity of her induction and amusement at the directness of her criticism. She struck him afresh, in all this, as an extraordinary mixture of innocence and crudity. “Does she never allow you more than three days at a time?” Miss Miller wished ironically to know. “Doesn’t she give you a vacation in summer? there’s no one so hard-worked but they can get leave to go off somewhere at this season. I suppose if you stay another day she’ll come right after you in the boat. Do wait over till Friday and I’ll go down to the landing to see her arrive!” He began at last even to feel he had been wrong to be disappointed in the temper in which his young lady had embarked. If he had missed the personal accent, the personal accent was now making its appearance. It sounded very distinctly, toward the end, in her telling him she’d stop “teasing” him if he’d promise her solemnly to come down to Rome that winter.
“That’s not a difficult promise to make,” he hastened to acknowledge. “My aunt has taken an apartment in Rome from January and has already asked me to come and see her.”
“I don’t want you to come for your aunt,” said Daisy; “I want you just to come for me.” And this was the only allusion he was ever to hear her make again to his invidious kinswoman. He promised her that at any rate he would certainly come, and after this she forbore from teasing. Winterbourne took a carriage and they drove back to Vevey in the dusk; the girl at his side, her animation a little spent, was now quite distractingly passive.
In the evening he mentioned to Mrs. Costello that he had spent the afternoon at Chillon with Miss Daisy Miller.
“The Americans—of the courier?” asked this lady.
“Ah happily the courier stayed at home.”
“She went with you all alone?”
“All alone.”
Mrs. Costello sniffed a little at her smelling-bottle. “And that,” she exclaimed, “is the little abomination you wanted me to know!”