His companion struck him as altogether too clever to be likely to indulge in a silly affectation of cynicism.

And yet, without this, how could one account for her sneering at virtue?
"You talk as if you had sounded the depths of vice!" he said, laughing.
"What do you know about other than virtuous charms ?" "I know, of course, nothing about vice; but I have known virtue when it was very tiresome." "Ah, then it was a poor affair.

It was poor virtue.

The best virtue is never tiresome." Miss Vivian looked at him a little, with her fine discriminating eye.
"What a dreadful thing to have to think any virtue poor!" This was a touching reflection, and it might have gone further had not the conversation been interrupted by Mrs.Vivian's appealing to her daughter to aid a defective recollection of a story about a Spanish family they had met at Biarritz, with which she had undertaken to entertain Gordon Wright.

After this, the little circle was joined by a party of American friends who were spending a week at Baden, and the conversation became general..